Category: Uncategorized

A Perfect Morning

Christ is risen from the dead,

trampling down death by death.

And upon those in the tombs,

bestowing life!

 

He has healed the fragmented world,

torn asunder through sin.

He has restored the unity of creation,

and closed the breach caused by deception.

 

Christ is risen from the dead,

causing all to sing for joy,

brightening the newborn day,

with hope!

 

This is the day that the Lord has made,

it is a day which shall never end!

Let us rejoice and be glad in this,

for creation is created anew!

 

Christ is risen from the dead,

giving fallen man new birth,

casting out the dark of sin,

bringing paradise to earth!

 

Let peace and mercy dwell together,

our hearts be the dwelling place of love.

Christ has risen from the dead,

let us live in faith and hope!

 

Christ is risen from the dead,

this is the perfect morning!

Beginning of the brand new day,

and Light that is never-ending!

 

~FS

The Praying Mouse

Little mouse, little creature,

I saw you suffering in a wide field.

Forlorn and forsaken (you appeared to me),

head low, with back arched against the formidable sky.

The weight of emptiness seeming to bear you down,

your tiny body nearly invisible beneath the world’s expanse.

 

Little creature, little friend,

I recognized in your pain the throes of death—

your shallow, labored breathing,

your eyes tight against the waning light—

would that I could raise you when you die,

instead, I raised you on my finger.

 

And finding a safer shelter for your final slumber,

I lowered you again to earth,

and tucked you in, amidst the fallen leaves.

You lifted your head as if in gratitude, or in hope?

Do not hope in me dear one,

I am just like you, powerless and small.

 

Little comfort could I give, but I gave,

a whispered, gentle prayer for you and me,

while stroking your soft fur to soothe you.

And saying my farewell,

with one final touch upon your brow,

I left you alone there, returning home.

 

I brought you with me, yet, in my mind,

the icon of your helpless body,

fated to be gobbled up by death.

This image terrorized and numbed me,

disturbed my thoughts, and stirring up despair,

made me frantic to understand and know…

 

Is innocence meant thus to suffer so alone?

Why can’t life beyond the grave be truly known?

When hope and faith seem so misplaced,

while staring death straight in the face,

what spark is there,

to make them kindle, and to grow?

 

I made myself as you, little mouse, with head hung low,

I hunched down to the earth, and prayed to God with tears.

It was the Lord who soothed my deathly fears,

and calmed my troubled, despairing mind.

It is the Comforter Who touched me on my brow,

and it is He who filled my aching heart.

 

Foolishly I had looked, but hadn’t seen,

the Breath of Life which enlivens you and me.

The Holy Spirit giving comfort from within,

perceived through the eyes of contrition.

 

Little creatures, you and I, so small and lowly,

yet through our suffering we are raised, and then made holy.

Giver of life, come and abide in us, I pray,

save our souls, as we await Your eternal day.

 

~FS

The Language of Beauty

Inspired silence, you are my friend, revealing beauty all around me—and in me.

I bite my tongue, lest I interrupt your sage instruction.

And I hold my thoughts still within me,

lest their noise distract from your divine eloquence.

 

Please continue, as you were saying…

you were beginning to share the mysteries of this life, the magic of our times.

You were enunciating the language of beauty,

of which all creation has spoken, since the beginning,

but which I have forgotten through misuse, and moreover by abuse.

 

I am not certain when I ceased speaking our native tongue, dear silence,

and commenced instead to speak other languages, coarser and ill-refined.

I have allowed myself to become a Tower of Babel—

strange languages have infested my inner halls,

a multitude of voices competing to be heard; a rabble within me,

loud and echoing, stark against my soul’s chamber walls.

 

I must confess I’ve spoken the languages of anger, and greed,

and above all vanity and pride,

and I’ve uttered words of lust and sadness.

I’ve made speeches of self-conceit,

and made myself hoarse asserting my ambitions—

my love sonnets have been composed for and about me alone.

 

But no, dear silence, I must now refrain;

and by pain of humility,

I have stilled these foolish voices.

Please, silence, dear friend, begin again…

 

I will listen to your unspoken words—

as they glide across the morning sky,

and unfurling like newborn leaves,

glittering, and sparkly in the dewy sunlight—

they do transfix and transform me.

 

Silence—

yours is a magnificent soliloquy,

spoken in a mystery,

ushering all into a world of beauty.

 

I do perceive you speak of God.

 

~FS

March 16

Indeed, we have seen that in the passion of gluttony, man delights in food outside of God–he considers it in and of itself and uses it only for his own pleasure. Since food is a creation of God (either directly or indirectly) and a gift of God to men, it has no value by itself but only through God, and is meant to be consumed Eucharistically. Thus, St Paul teaches that God “created [it] to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.”

Man is healed of his passion and regains a virtuous attitude by the turning around of his attitude that led him to consider food in itself and have it serve his own pleasure to considering such food in God, linking it to Him and giving Him thanks for it. Thus St Paul advises: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

By consuming food in such a manner, man sanctifies it, and in it, the created cosmos which it represents. But above all, he simultaneously sanctifies himself, not only doing away with the barrier that gluttony erected between man and God, but also uniting himself all the more to God every time he gives Him thanks.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses, vol. 3, pp. 10-11)

March 15

…what man is potentially in his nature by grace, he must also become personally and actively by his free will in all his life and being. For, as St Gregory of Nyssa warns: “That which you all have not become, you are not.”

And St Diadochus of Photice spells out in detail that if the first of the gifts bestowed by the grace of baptism is the immediate restoration of the image of God, the second gift–the likeness of God–“requires our cooperation.”

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol. 2, p. 57)

March 14

Keep before your eyes the benefits received from your birth until now, be they bodily or spiritual; go over them and meditate on them, according to what is written: “Forget not all his benefits,” in order that they may bring you to love God quickly and easily…in order that your heart, at the remembrance of these benefits and even more so spurred on from on high, might spontaneously be wounded with love and desire.

~St Mark the Ascetic

March 13

Pleasure is only a fleeting delight. Yea, pleasure quickly takes flight, and we cannot tie it down even for a few moments. For such is the destiny of human and sensible things: hardly do we possess them, and they escape us…They offer nothing solid or assured, nothing fixed or permanent. They flow away more rapidly than rivers of water and leave empty and indigent those who search after them with such burning zeal. On the contrary, however, spiritual goods present us an altogether different character. They are firm, assured, constant and eternal. [Is it not] then a strange folly to exchange immutable things for transitory delight, immortal bliss for pleasures of the moment, and true and eternal felicity for quick and frivolous sensual joys?

~St John Chrysostom

March 12

Love of money and greed further destroy charity and pervert relationships with others by leading him whom they possess to see in his neighbor nothing more than an obstacle to the preservation of possessed riches or a means to acquire new ones. John Chrysostom also notes that “love of money brings us universal hatred” and “makes us detest everyone, the victims of injustice and even those whom our injustices have not trampled down.”

…These passions constantly provoke arguments and disputes. St John Chrysostom observes: “In riches, there is nothing but causes of affliction, divisions, quarrels, snares, hatred, thefts, envy, separations, enmities, storms, remembrance of wrong, hard-heartedness, murders.”

…As for greed, St Gregory of Nyssa remarks that it unleashes in man “either anger with his kith and kin, or pride towards his inferiors, or envy of those above him; then hypocrisy comes in after this envy; a soured temper after that; a misanthropic spirit after that.”

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol.1, pp. 176-177)

March 11

The pathological character of love of money and greed is likewise and consequently made manifest in the relationship of man to himself. Subject to these two passions, he lacks the most basic love with regard to himself; he prefers money and material riches to his own soul. Preoccupied with keeping the goods he possesses and acquiring new ones, he neither takes care for his soul, nor does he worry about his salvation.

St John Cassian says that he neglects “the image and likeness of God…which [he] should preserve without stain in himself” by worshiping God: “Indeed, one cannot love both one’s soul and money.” Occupied with increasing and maintaining material wealth, man cannot develop his spiritual potentialities and effect the blossoming of his nature, and thus he keeps himself enclosed within the limits of the fallen world.

Even though he believes that he truly enriches himself–that he gains his freedom and guarantees himself life in gathering treasures on earth, he alienates and pins down all his being and existence to this world and “the flesh”, “for where man’s treasure is, there his heart is also”.

…Above all, it takes the place of spiritual delights which are incomparably superior and alone capable of fully satisfying man, whom pleasure in the end deprives of eternal bliss. Thus it is clearly apparent that man in many ways becomes “his own enemy”, as St John Chrysostom says, through love of money and greed.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses, vol.1, p.174)

March 10

Where there is the love of God, “Christ is all and in all” and “there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man” “neither male nor female.” On the contrary, where self-love reigns, there one sees only oppositions, divisions, rivalries, envy, jealousy, dissensions, enmity, quarrels, aggression, all manifestations which are the fruits of this passion, as are unsociability, injustice, the exploitation of others and even murders and wars.

Self-love appears then to be deeply pathogenic on many levels, and is considered by the Fathers–as much in its nature as in its effects–as the mark of a man who has become mad and as itself being mad and profoundly irrational.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol.1, pp.149-150)