Living the Scriptures

I would rather fully and completely live one verse of Scripture than memorize the entire Bible.

An English Mystic

"By this you may know that you are infinitely beloved: God hath made your spirit a center in eternity comprehending all, and filled all about you in an endless manner with infinite riches: which shine before you and surround you with divine and heavenly enjoyments."
-- Thomas Traherne "Centuries of Meditations"

Seeking Humility? Empty Yourself!

In Ephesians 4:1 St. Paul has these words, "...walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness..." and in Luke 14 Jesus says,"When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest seat; lest a more honorable man than thou be bidden of him; and he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest place; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher; then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."

These two passages of scripture connect dramatically to teach us something important about our spiritual journey. They talk about the importance of emptiness and how through emptiness we can come to a full relationship with God through Christ.

When we look at the Beatitudes and those virtues normally considered important for Christians to attain, we see that humility and meekness figure significantly into a deep spiritual relationship with God. The fact is that we can only find our spiritual selves and our union with God when we are truly meek....when we honestly put ourselves second and God first. To be meek is to be gentle and kind and to empty oneself of all selfishness and ambition. Truly emptying the self is part of the message of Jesus in the Gospel.

Emptying the self is not a hard concept to understand, although some people try to make it so. It sounds very "Eastern" and it is, but it's also a core concept of the Gospels. It is allowing ourselves to give up our pride and make our hearts truly a place in which Christ can abide. When we are full of pride we are self-focused and when we are self-focused we can't see others and we can't see God. We see only ourselves. Everything we do is focused on us. How can we love God when we're so busy loving ourselves? Have you ever heard the phrase, "He's really full of himself?" It means a person is self-focused and full of pride. One is so full, there's no place for anything else. Therefore, if you want to love God you must empty yourself of all pride and self-love if there's going to be room for God.

In the Gospel above, Jesus talks about people who are so full of themselves they always have to try to have the most important place. They want everyone to see them and know how important they are. However, there's always someone more important in society...always someone with more money...always someone with more power. When we push for the head of the table that someone can come along and kick us out of our chair. So now we become angry...we're hurt...don't they know how important we are? Now our day is ruined and we just might be upset enough to ruin someone else's day, too. That's O.K., of course, because we're the most important thing on earth. How incredibly selfish! Do you know what we've just done? We've just set ourselves above God. Our pride has put us in the first place. We have no space for God.

The process of emptying the self of our pride is not easy. It takes work. Just read some of the writings of the great spiritual masters of the church and you'll see how they struggled with that themselves.You may ask, "Father, how do I empty myself of pride and allow God to fill me?" Well, I've got a suggestion. It has worked for many and it will work for you, too.

First, it's important to find a good spiritual advisor and has the ability to direct you down the correct spiritual path. This might be difficult to do. Don’t settle for "pop" theology and the latest craze in spirituality. Those are false paths that, at best, will take you nowhere, and at worst will destroy your faith. Like a wolf in sheep's clothing, Satan loves to sneak in through that door. Find a spiritual advisor grounded in the true faith of the Church and of the Early Fathers. Someone who has your spiritual well being at heart and will not lead you down any path other than towards Christ. It takes prayer, the study of scripture, the study of the spiritual masters of the church, like St. John Climacus, and contemplation.

It is also helpful to go before the cross or an icon of Christ in contemplation. Perhaps use the Jesus Prayer, "Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Repeat it over and over...don't even think about how many times you say it. Just look at the icon or the cross and say the Jesus Prayer. Allow your pride to flow out of you until you feel the emptiness in your heart. Ask Christ to take that burden of pride from you and be willing to give it up to Him. Then allow the love of Christ to flow into you. Rejoice in its beauty and warmth. If you do this often, you will begin to see many positive changes in yourself. For one thing, your pride will begin to melt away and you'll find the joy of humility that is promised to us. Christ can't be in your heart if you're filling it with pride. Humility allows you to open yourself to Jesus. To empty your heart to Him. "For everyone who exhalts himself shall be humbled and whoever humbles himself shall be exhalted." Take the lowest seat. Practice humility in your life. Empty yourself and allow the love of Christ to completely fill you.

The Eucharistic Celebration, the Work of "Christus Totus"

Lately I've been reading Pope Benedict XVI's book, "The Sacrament of Charity." It is one of the most beautiful works I've read on the Eucharist. Part II discusses the Eucharist as "A Mystery to be Celebrated" and I wanted to share this litte piece of it because I find it particularly beautiful. The Holy Father says:

"The 'subject' of the liturgy's intrinsic beauty is Christ himself, risen and glorified in the Holy Spirit, who includes the Church in his work. Here we can recall an evocative phrase of Saint Augustine which strikingly describes this dynamic of faith proper to the Eucharist. The great Bishop of Hippo, speaking specifically of the eucharistic mystery, stresses the fact that Christ assimilates us to himself: 'The bread you see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ. The chalice, or rather, what the chalice contains, sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ. In these signs, Chirst the Lord willed to entrust to us his body and the blood which he shed for the forgiveness of our sins. If you have received them properly, you yourselves are what you have received.' Consequently, 'not only have we become Christians, we have become Christ himself.' We can thus contemplate God's mysterious work, which brings about a profound unity between ourselves and the Lord Jesus: 'one should not believe that Christ is in the head but not in the body; rather he is complete in the head and in the body.'"
-- Benedict XVI "The Sacrament of Charity"

This is an interesting parallel to what we pray in the Prayer of Humble Access: "Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us." Amen!

To Be Simple

"...anyone who freely chooses to be simple and guileless provides the devil with neither the time nor the place for an attack."
-- St. John Climacus "The Ladder of Divine Ascent"

The Gift of God's Mercy

"...put no faith in fears of your own, however much you may have striven...God has mercy on us, not for our achievements but gratis, because of His goodness."
-- St. Silouan the Athonite

Butterflies are Free

The Epistle for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity is a powerful one. In this epistle, St. Paul addresses several doctrinal and ethical problems that had arisen in the Church in Corinth. One of those issues was the individual believer’s bodily resurrection.

It seems that some of the Corinthians had come to believe that the bodily resurrection of Jesus himself was false. They also assumed that, given their false assumption, the resurrection of our bodies was not possible. Now, the Corinthians were Greeks and, being Greeks, they had no problem believing in an immortal soul. Such belief had been a part of Greek philosophy and mythology for centuries. However, they could not fathom a complete bodily resurrection. In the 15th chapter of this Epistle, Paul addresses this problem and in doing so gives us a powerful understanding of our own resurrection.

Paul makes some startling statements to the effect that if the resurrection isn’t true, then our whole faith is a lie. He says,

“…if there is no resurrection from the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

He’s right.

If Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is not true then nothing that we do as Christians is true. If His resurrection never happened then we’re wasting our time being in church. However, it did happen and Paul goes to great lengths to tell us that Jesus not only rose from the dead, but he was seen by over 500 people after his resurrection. That’s a pretty big deal. One could look with a jaundiced eye if only the apostles said they saw him, but over 500 people saw the physical body of Christ after his resurrection. So we know for a fact that Jesus did rise from the dead and, therefore, our faith is not in vain. This isn’t the only facet of our resurrection that St. Paul touches upon. Paul also addresses what kind of body we’ll have after our resurrection.

As I mentioned before, the Greeks believed in an immortal soul, but they didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection. What they were expecting is what many of us expect. If someone dies we rather expect a resurrected person to look at resurrection just like they did before they died. That’s an easy picture for us to hold in our minds, but Paul says that’s incorrect. He says this:

“But some one will ask, ‘how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as He has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is alike….so it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body….just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this brethren; flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable….for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”

Paul’s agrarian analogy works very well because it helps us with our limited capacity to have some level of understanding of this miracle that is part of the promise of our salvation in Christ. It made me think of an analogy, too.

Think of the caterpillar that turns into a butterfly. The caterpillar has one kind of body which is completely different from that of a butterfly. It’s low to the ground and must crawl along on little stumpy legs. No one thinks much of a caterpillar until it goes into its cocoon. There it changes dramatically. What was once fuzzy and ugly and slow becomes through a miracle a beautiful butterfly. It becomes a different creature that can fly and float on the wind. It is as dramatically different from its former self as it could possibly be. To get there, however, it had to change. It had to die to its old self to be reborn miraculously into a new and more beautiful self. So it is, Paul tells us, with ourselves.

In baptism we die to our old sinful selves to be reborn in Christ. That doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t ever sin again, but we’re now different than we were before. After baptism we grow in Christ, nourished by his body and blood in the sacrament, until one day we also die. One day this body of dust that has served us here on earth; this body with which we encountered and grew in our Lord changes. It dies and rots away. Like the caterpillar and the butterfly we leave our body and emerge in a new, more wonderful spiritual body. A body that no longer feels pain, or suffering. Then, as paul says,

“…the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality.”

This, my friends, is the promise of the resurrection. It’s not a fantasy because we know by the truth of the resurrection of Christ that it is true. Here in the 15th chapter of First Corinthians St. Paul has reinforced for us this fact of our faith.

The fact that with every funeral there comes a resurrection.

That with sadness joy follows.

The fact that with our death… in Christ we are born to eternal life.

Think about that the next time you see a butterfly.