Two weeks ago, on the Sunday in Great Lent when the Church reminds us of the life and teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, we recalled the practice of hesychia, or “stillness” – the quieting of our souls, in order to hear God speaking to us. The person seeking this stillness, and the purity of heart needed to hear God, must live the ascetic life of the Orthodox Church in order to be free from all worldly influences. This concept isn’t foreign to us – at least, it shouldn’t be, given that we hear it at every Divine Liturgy, in the words of the Cherubic Hymn: “Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim, and chant the thrice-holy hymn unto the life-creating Trinity, now lay aside all earthly care; that we may receive the King of all Who cometh invisibly upborne in triumph by the ranks of angels.”
Last week, on the Sunday of the Veneration of the Holy Cross, we were reminded that, to be followers of our Lord Jesus Christ, we must take up our Cross, and follow Him. The Cross is carried by us through the Orthodox way of life: a life of prayer, and fasting, of giving, and of struggling to overcome our passions with the virtues that oppose them; a life of loving God, and loving God in each other, and so forgiving, and seeking to be humble, seeing only our own sins, and not the sins of others. Once again, we see that the Orthodox way of life, by which we take up our Cross and follow our Lord, is the way of the ascetic life.
Today, the fourth Sunday of Great Lent, we are given the example of the life and teachings of St. John of the Ladder. He went to Mount Sinai, where the holy prophet Moses had brought the people of Israel after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, and received from God the Ten Commandments written by the finger of God on tablets of stone. There, as a young man of sixteen years, St. John became a monk, and served his spiritual father for nineteen years. When his spiritual father reposed in the Lord, St. John then lived as a hermit in a small cave, practicing a very strict form of the ascetic life. He became the abbot of the monastery there on Mount Sinai, and worked many miracles. He died at the age of eighty, in or around the year 649.
It was while he was living the ascetic life alone in his cave that he wrote the book that has given him the name by which we know him today: “The Ladder of Divine Ascent.” In his book, St. John describes the way that a monk – that is to say, in the Orthodox point of view, anyone who pursues an ascetic way of life (which is not the exclusive practice only of monastics) – can raise his soul from earth to heaven, as though one was climbing a ladder. It is not so much a book of spiritual practices or exercises or techniques; rather, it instructs and directs those who desire to draw closer to God by revealing the realities of life in this world and in the heavenly realm, so as to encourage and inspire us by a glimpse of the divine vision.
Through these great teachers, such as St. John of the Ladder, we gain insight as well into the first Gospel reading today. The disciples of our Lord, St. Mark tells us, were unable to heal a demon-possessed boy; and, when they ask our Lord about this, He tells them that “this kind only comes out by prayer and fasting.” We see, over and over again in the lives of the saints, how they gain power over the demons because they lived an ascetic life. We are warned, however, that it is not “merely” prayer and fasting that has accomplished this. In the deepest sense, prayer and fasting are effective against the attacks of the demons only when we have, through the ascetic disciplines, achieved a state of true humility – thinking nothing of ourselves, whether praised, insulted, or ignored; and a state of total obedience to the will of God, having surrendered our own will freely to God, trusting ourselves entirely to His great mercy. We cannot overcome the demons without overcoming our passions – the avenues by which the demons attack us, to draw us away from God, and claim us as their own.
Brothers and sisters, in the time that remains to us in this season of Great Lent, let us give thanks to God for the wise teachers He has given to us; and let us also pay heed to their example and instructions. Let us dedicate ourselves to drawing nearer to God, to ascending the ladder by which we leave this earthly life behind, so that we might grow in the life of the world to come – to the glory of God, and the salvation of souls.
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