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Our hands may be closed, our fists clenched, as a gesture of defiance or in an effort to grasp and to hold fast, thus expressing aggression or fear. At the other extreme our hands may hang listlessly by our sides, neither defiant nor receptive. Or else, as a third possibility, our hands may be lifted up like those of the Orans, no longer clenched but open, no longer listless but ready to receive the gifts of the Spirit.
The whole aim of the Christian life is to be a Spirit-bearer, to live in the Spirit of God, to breathe the Spirit of God.
“The wind (or spirit) blows where it wishes; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from, or where it is going” (John 3:8). We know that the wind is there, we hear it in the trees as we lie awake at night, we feel it on our faces as we walk on the hills. But if we try to grasp and hold it in our hands, it is lost. So it is with the Spirit of God.
Like the air, the Spirit is source of life, “everywhere present and filling all things”, always around us, always within us. Just as the air remains itself invisible to us but acts as the medium through which we see and hear other things, so the Spirit does not reveal to us his own face, but shows us always the face of Christ.
Like the wind, fire is elusive: alive, free, ever moving, not to be measured, weighed, or constricted within narrow limits. We feel the heat of the flames, but we cannot enclose and retain them in our hands.
First, the Spirit is a person. He is not just a “divine blast” (as once I heard someone describe him), not just an insentient force, but one of the three eternal persons of the Trinity; and so, for all his seeming elusiveness, we can and do enter into a personal “I-Thou” relationship with him. Secondly, the Spirit, as the third member of the Holy Trinity, is coequal and coeternal with the other two; he is not merely a function dependent upon them or an intermediary that they employ.
Christ sends the Spirit to us, but at the same time it is the Spirit who sends Christ. Let us recall and develop some of the Trinitarian patterns outlined above (p. 35-36).
“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20). How is Christ present in our midst? Through the Holy Spirit. “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world” (Matt. 28:20). How is Christ always with us? Through the Holy Spirit. Because of the Comforter's presence in our heart, we do not simply know Christ at fourth or fifth hand, as a distant figure from long ago, about whom we possess factual information through written records; but we know him directly, here and now, in the present, as our personal Saviour and our friend.
First, it is a gift to all God's people: “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4).
Secondly, it is a gift of unity: “They were all with one accord in one place” (Acts 2:1).
Thirdly, the gift of the Spirit is a gift of diversity: the tongues of fire are “cloven” or “divided” (Acts 2:3), and they are distributed to each one directly.
Not only does the Holy Spirit make us all one, but he makes us each different.
Important though his advice may be, far more important is his intercessory prayer. He makes his children whole by praying constantly for them, by identifying himself with them, by accepting their joys and sorrows as his own, by taking on his shoulders the burden of their guilt or anxiety. No one can be a starets if he does not pray insistently for others.
The Pentecostal spark of the Spirit, existing in each one of us from Baptism, is to be kindled into a living flame. We are to become what we are.
There are, however, many kinds of tears, and not all are a gift of the Spirit. Besides spiritual tears, there are tears of anger and frustration, tears shed in self-pity, sentimental and emotional tears. Discernment is needed; hence the importance of seeking the help of an experienced spiritual guide, a starets. Discernment is even more necessary in the case of “tongues”. Often it is not the Spirit of God that is speaking through the tongues, but the all-too-human spirit of auto-suggestion and mass hysteria. There are even occasions when “speaking with tongues” is a form of demonic possession.
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Our aim in the life of prayer is not to gain feelings or “sensible” experiences of any particular kind, but simply and solely to conform our will to God's. “I seek not what is yours but you”, says St Paul to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 12:14); and we say the same to God. We seek not the gifts but the Giver.
The first stage here is praktiki or the practice of the virtues; the second stage is physiki or the contemplation of nature; the third and final stage, our journey's end, is theologia or “theology” in the strict sense of the word, that is, the contemplation of God himself.
Prayer is a living relationship between persons, and personal relationships cannot be neatly classified. In particular it should be emphasized that the three stages are not strictly consecutive, the one coming to an end before the next begins. Direct glimpses of the divine glory are sometimes conferred by God on a person as an unexpected gift, before the person has even begun to repent and to commit himself to the struggle of the “active life”.
No one, then, can ever claim in this life to have passed beyond the first stage. The three stages are not so much successive as simultaneous. We are to think of the spiritual life in terms of three deepening levels, interdependent, coexisting with each other.
When St Antony of Egypt was asked, “What rules shall I keep so as to please God?”, he replied: “Wherever you go, have God always before your eyes; in whatever you do or say, have an example from the Holy Scriptures; and whatever the place in which you dwell, do not be quick to move elsewhere. Keep these three things, and you will live.”
The real purpose of Bible study is much more than this—to feed our love for Christ, to kindle our hearts into prayer, and to provide us with guidance in our personal life.
We are to hold in balance two complementary truths: without God's grace we can do nothing; but without our voluntary co-operation God will do nothing. “The will of man is an essential condition, for without it God does nothing”15 (The Homilies of St Macarius). Our salvation results from the convergence of two factors, unequal in value yet both indispensable: divine initiative and human response. What God does is incomparably the more important, but man's participation is also required.
Repentance marks the starting-point of our journey. The Greek term metanoia, as we have noted (p. 14), signifies primarily a “change of mind”.
Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope—not downwards at our own shortcomings but upwards at God's love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. To repent is to open our eyes to the light. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be
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Watchfulness means, among other things, to be present where we are—at this specific point in space, at this particular moment in time. All too often we are scattered and dispersed; we are living, not with alertness in the present, but with nostalgia in the past, or with misgiving and wishful thinking in the future.
Growing in watchfulness and self-knowledge, the traveller upon the Way begins to acquire the power of discrimination or discernment (in Greek, diakrisis). This acts as a spiritual sense of taste. Just as the physical sense of taste, if healthy, tells a man at once whether food is mouldy or wholesome, so the spiritual taste, if developed through ascetic effort and prayer, enables a man to distinguish between the varying thoughts and impulses within him.
Through discrimination, then, a man begins to take more careful note of what is happening within him, and so he learns to guard the heart, shutting the door against the temptations or provocations of the enemy. “Guard your heart with all diligence” (Prov. 4:23). When the heart is mentioned in Orthodox spiritual texts, it is to be understood in the full Biblical sense. The heart signifies not simply the physical organ in the chest, not simply the emotions and affections, but the spiritual center of man's being, the human person as made in God's image—the deepest and truest self, the inner
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The second stage upon the threefold Way is the contemplation of nature—more exactly, the contemplation of nature in God, or the contemplation of God in and through nature. The second stage is thus a prelude and means of entry to the third: by contemplating the things which God has made, the man of prayer is brought to the contemplation of God himself. This second stage of physiki or “natural contemplation”, as we have stated, is not necessarily subsequent to praktiki but may be simultaneous with it.
ground. To contemplate nature is to become aware of the dimensions of sacred space and sacred time. This material object, this person to whom I am talking, this moment of time—each is holy, each is in its own way unrepeatable and so of infinite value, each can serve as a window into eternity. And, becoming sensitive to God's world around myself, I grow more conscious also of God's world within myself. Beginning to see nature in God, I begin to see my own place as a human person within the natural order; I begin to understand what it is to be microcosm and mediator.
God is above and beyond all things, yet as Creator he is also within all things—“panentheism”, not pantheism (p. 46). To contemplate nature, then, is in Blake's phrase to cleanse the “doors of our perception”, both on the physical and on the spiritual level, and thereby to discern the energies or logoi of God in everything that he has made. It is to discover, not so much through our discursive reason as through our spiritual intellect, that the whole universe is a cosmic Burning Bush, filled with the divine Fire yet not consumed.
First, it means appreciating the “thusness” or “thisness” of particular things, persons and moments. We are to see each stone, each leaf, each blade of grass, each frog, each human face, for what it truly is, in all the distinctness and intensity of its specific being. As the prophet Zechariah warns us, we are not to “despise the day of small things”
(4:10). “True mysticism”, says Olivier Clément, “is to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary.” No existing thing is paltry or despicable, for as God's handiwork each has its unique place in the created order. Sin alone is mean and trivial, as are most of the products of a fallen and sinful technology; but sin, as we have already noted, is not a real thing, and the products of sinfulness, despite their apparent solidity and destructive power, partake likewise of the same unreality.
To look on the glass is to perceive the “thisness”, the intense reality, of each thing; to look through the glass and so to “espie” the heaven is to discern God's presence within and yet beyond that thing. These two ways of looking at the world confirm and complement one another. Creation leads us to God, and God sends us back again to creation, enabling us to look at nature with the eyes of Adam in Paradise. For, seeing all things in God, we see them with a vividness that they would never otherwise possess.
It does not, however, follow that we are to accept the fallen world on its own terms. This is the unhappy mistake of much “secular Christianity” in the contemporary west. All things are indeed sacred in their true being, according to their innermost essence; but our relationship to God's creation has been distorted by sin, original and personal, and we shall not rediscover this intrinsic sacredness unless our heart is purified. Without self-denial, without ascetic discipline, we cannot affirm the true beauty of the world. That is why there can be no genuine contemplation without repentance.
In order to find God, we do not have to leave the world, to isolate ourselves from our fellow humans, and to plunge into some kind of mystical void. On the contrary, Christ is looking at us through the eyes of all those whom we meet. Once we recognize his universal presence, all our acts of practical service to others become acts of prayer.
So the second stage of the spiritual Way leads him, with God's help, to the third stage, when God is no longer known solely through the medium of what he has made but in direct and unmediated union.
Reaching out towards the eternal Truth that lies beyond all human words and thoughts, the seeker begins to wait upon God in quietness and silence, no longer talking about or to God but simply listening. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).
This stillness or inward silence is known in Greek as hesychia, and he who seeks the prayer of stillness is termed a hesychast. Hesychia signifies concentration combined with inward tranquility.
The Jesus Prayer is not just a hypnotic incantation but a meaningful phrase, an invocation addressed to another Person. Its object is not relaxation but alertness, not waking slumber but living prayer. And so the Jesus Prayer is not to be said mechanically but with inward purpose; yet at the same time the words should be pronounced without tension, violence, or undue emphasis. The string round our spiritual parcel should be taut, not left hanging slack; yet it should not be drawn so tight as to cut into the edges of the package.
Normally three levels or degrees are distinguished in the saying of the Jesus Prayer. It starts as “prayer of the lips”, oral prayer. Then it grows more inward, becoming “prayer of the intellect”, mental prayer. Finally the intellect “descends” into the heart and is united with it, and so the prayer becomes “prayer of the heart” or, more exactly, “prayer of the intellect in the heart”. At this level it becomes prayer of the whole person—no longer something that we think or say, but something that we are: for the ultimate purpose of the spiritual Way is not just a person who says prayers from
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So the Jesus Prayer begins as an oral prayer like any other. But the rhythmic repetition of the same short phrase enables the hesychast, by virtue of the very simplicity of the words which he uses, to advance beyond all language and images into the mystery of God. In this way the Jesus Prayer develops, with God's help, into what Western writers call “prayer of loving attention” or “prayer of simple gaze”, where the soul rests in God without a constantly varying succession of images, ideas and feelings. Beyond this there is a further stage, when the hesychast's prayer ceases to be the result of
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Let us follow the advice of St John Climacus, “Confine your mind within the words of prayer.”34 God will do the rest, but in his own way and at his own time.
First, there is between the three persons of the Trinity a union according to essence: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are “one in essence”. But between God and the saints no such union takes place. Although “ingodded” or “deified”, the saints do not become additional members of the Trinity. God remains God, and man remains man. Man becomes god by grace, but not God in essence.
Secondly, there is between the divine and the human natures of the incarnate Christ a union according to hypostasis, a “hypostatic” or personal union: Godhead and manhood in Christ are so joined that they constitute, or belong to, a single person. Once more, the union between God and the saints is not of this kind.
Since, then, the union between God and the human beings that he has created is a union neither according to essence nor according to hypostasis, it remains thirdly that it should be a union according to energy.
The saints do not become God by essence nor one person with God, but they participate in the energies of God, that is to say, in his life, power, grace and glory. The energies, as we have insisted, are not to be “objectified” or regarded as an intermediary between God and man, a “thing” or gift which God bestows on his creation.
The energies are truly God himself—yet not God as he exists within himself, in his inner life, but God as he communicates himself in outgoing love. He who participates in God's energies is therefore meeting God himself face to face, through a direct and per...
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“Darkness” language, as applied to God, takes its origin chiefly from the Biblical description of Moses upon Mount Sinai, when he is said to enter into the “thick darkness” where God was (Exod. 20:21: compare p. 13). It is significant that in this passage it is not stated that God is darkness, but that he dwells in darkness: the darkness denotes, not the absence or unreality of God, but the inability of our human mind to grasp God's inner nature. The darkness is in us, and not in him.
As Jacob Boehme puts it, “The darkness is not the absence of light, but the terror that comes from the blinding light.”42 If God is said to dwell in darkness, that does not mean that there is in God any lack or privation, but that he is a fullness of glory and love beyond our comprehension.
“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8). It is for us to begin. If we take one step towards the Lord, he takes ten towards us—he who saw the prodigal son while he was yet at a distance, and had compassion and ran and embraced him.44 Tito Colliander
