September 15

A person who keeps turning round and round on the same spot and does not want to make any spiritual progress is like a mule that walks round and round a well-head operating a water-wheel. Always to be battling with your carnal proclivities and to be concerned only with disciplining the body through various forms of ascetic labor is to mistake God’s purpose and unwittingly to inflict great damage on yourself. ‘The gain to be derived from bodily discipline is but limited’, says St Paul (1 Timothy 4:8)–at any rate as long as the earth-bound will of the flesh has not been swallowed up in tears of repentance, as long as the life-quickening deadness of the Spirit has not supervened in our body, and the law of the Spirit does not reign in our mortal flesh.

But true devotion of soul attained through the spiritual knowledge of created things and of their immortal essences is as a tree of life within the spiritual activity of the intellect: it is ‘profitable in all things’ (cf. 1 Timothy 4:8) and everywhere, bestowing purity of heart, pacifying the soul’s powers, giving light to the intellect and chastity to the body, and conferring restraint, all-embracing self-control, humility, compunction, love, holiness, heavenly knowledge, divine wisdom, and the contemplation of God. If then, as a result of great spiritual discipline you have attained such perfection of true devotion you will have crossed the Red Sea of the passions and will have entered the promised land, from which flow the milk and honey of divine knowledge (cf. Exodus 3:8), the inexhaustible delight of the saints.

~Nikitas Stithatos

September 14

As you pray and sing psalms to the Lord, watch out for the guile of the demons. Either they deceive us into saying one thing instead of another, snatching the soul’s attention and turning the verses of the psalms into blasphemies, so that we say things that we should not say; or, when we have started with a psalm, they cause us to skip to the end of it, distracting the intellect from what lies between; or else they make us return time and again to the same verse, through absentmindedness preventing us from going on to what comes next; or, when we are in the middle of a psalm, they suddenly blank out the intellect’s memory of the sequence of the verses, so that we cannot even remember what verse of the psalm it was that we were saying, and thus we repeat it once more….

We should persevere strongly, however, and continue the psalm more slowly, so that through contemplation we may reap the profit of prayer from the verses and become rich with the light of the Holy Spirit that fills the souls of those who pray.

~Nikitas Stithatos

September 13

If you generate the honey of the virtues in stillness, you will through struggle and self-discipline transcend the lowly estate of man’s fallen condition and by overcoming your presumption you will restore the soul’s powers to their natural state. Your heart purified by tears, you will now become receptive to the rays of the Spirit, will clothe yourself in the incorruption of the life-quickening deadness of Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 15:53, 2 Cor. 4:10), and will receive the Paraclete in tongues of fire in the upper room of your stillness (cf. Acts 2:3).

You will then be under an obligation to speak unreservedly of the wonderful works of God (cf. Acts 2:11) and to ‘declare His righteousness in the great congregation’ (cf. Psalm 40:10), for you will have received inwardly the law of the Spirit (cf. John 7:38; Romans 8:2); otherwise, like the wicked servant who hid the talent of his own master, you will be cast into eternal fire (cf. Matthew 25:30).

~Nikitas Stithatos

September 12

The mystery of prayer is not consummated at a certain specific time or place. For if you restrict prayer to particular times or places, you will waste the rest of the time in vain pursuits. Prayer may be defined as the intellect’s unceasing intercourse with God. Its task is to engage the soul totally in things divine, its fulfillment–to adapt the words of St Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:17)–lies in so wedding the mind to God that it becomes one spirit with Him.

~Nikitas Stithatos

You Are Might

I do not feel You,

yet still,

I know You are near.

 

My thoughts disappear into darkness,

yet still,

I know that You hear.

 

I am rooted in You,

although,

I do not know how.

 

I am filled by You,

although,

I cannot say how.

 

We meet—

without word,

without emotion,

without thought.

 

I am standing in a cold,

indifferent night,

within a strange,

unfamiliar light.

 

And You are might.

You are might.

 

~FS

September 11

You cannot be indifferent to both fame and disgrace, or rise above pleasure and pain, unless you are enabled by grace to perceive the upshot of all worldly preoccupations. For when you realize that the resultant of fame, pleasure, indulgence, wealth and prosperity is naught, since death and decay await them, then you will recognize the blatant vanity of all things worldly and will turn your eyes to the consummation of things divine.

You will cleave to the realities that truly exist and cannot perish; and, making these things your own, you will rise above pain and pleasure; above pain in that you have defeated that which in your soul loves pleasure, fame and money; above pleasure, in that you have become impervious to worldly sensations. Thus you are the same whether you are honored or scorned, attacked by bodily pain or endued with bodily ease. In all things you will give thanks to God and you will not be cast down.

~Nikitas Stithatos

September 10

If you are not called by God to a high status, never try to attain it through money or human support or by demanding it, even if you know you can help others. For if you do, three things lie in wait for you, and of them one will surely happen: either God’s anger and wrath will fall upon you in the form of diverse assaults and misfortunes–for not only men but virtually the whole of creation will turn on you, and your life will be full of anguish; or your enemies will gain the upper hand and expel you from your position in deep disgrace; or you will die before your time, cut off from the present life.

~Nikitas Stithatos

The Mind of the Orthodox Church (Book Review):

There is a commonly heard aphorism in the Orthodox Church which states that we do not change the church, but the church changes us. This concept, along with the injunction in scripture to be ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds’ (cf. Romans 12:2), influenced my decision to pick up and read, The Mind of the Orthodox Church, by Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Hierotheos.

The goal of the book is simple and straightforward, to convey clearly what exactly the mind of the Orthodox Church is—its historical origin and divine revelation, its definition and characteristics, how it has been clarified over time by the church fathers and ecumenical councils as well as by the lives of its martyrs and saints, and how it differs from the mind of the secular world and of other heretical tendencies.

The underlying hope, and secondary goal of the book, is that by knowing the mind of the church, and by understanding this mind with greater clarity, the members of the church can then go about attaining this mind for themselves, using this knowledge to guide their own thinking and actions. The reason this is important, as stated in the book, is that the church body is not merely an organization, but is a living organism, and as such all of its members should be animated by the same mind and life. As St Paul writes, we should all be of ‘one mind’ (cf. Philippians 2:2).

Because the book is intended to help us change our own minds, it is a challenging book to read but also very rewarding, for anyone that takes the faith seriously and sincerely wants to follow the commands given in scripture, and by the church traditions. Within the book’s introduction the author makes the following point, again in relation to St Paul’s epistles:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). If this passage is associated with what the Apostle said before and after it—where he was speaking of the ‘perfect’ in relation to what is ‘in part’ and about seeing God ‘face to face’ in relation to ‘seeing in a mirror dimly’—then we can understand that the mind of the Church is connected with man’s spiritual fulfilment, which consists in partaking of the purifying, illuminating and deifying energy of God.

Acquiring the mind of the church is therefore about relinquishing the mind of the ‘world’ and growing up—leaving off the ‘childish’ things from our past, and putting on the new things that make us mature in the faith, and ‘adult’ followers of Christ.

~FS

September 9

If you love money you do not love Christ; if you do not love Christ, but love money, think to whose likeness that tyrant will reduce you: it will make you like the disciple who was unfaithful, who appeared to be a friend but was a traitor, who acted viciously towards the Master of All, and who fell miserably from both faith and love, plunging into the depths of despair. Fear his example and listen to my counsel: spurn money and love for money, so that you may gain the love of Christ. If not, well, you know the place prepared for those who have fallen.

~Nikitas Stithatos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 8

If you aspire to friendship with Christ, you will hate money and the gluttonous love of money; for money lures towards itself the mind of whoever loves it and diverts it from love for Jesus, a love which, I think, is expressed not in words but in action, in the carrying out of His commandments (cf. John 14:15). If, alas, what you want is money, you will hoard away as much of it as you can, setting this desire for money above love for Christ, and regarding wealth as a gain and not as the greatest disaster that can befall you. You should realize, however, that money is in fact disastrous to you, and the disaster will be all the greater because you will also lose your true wealth, God, without whom the life of salvation is impossible.

~Nikitas Stithatos