“If but ten among us lead a holy life, we shall kindle a fire which shall light up the entire city.” — St. John Chrysostom

“The Rapture: An Invention of Man”

An interesting broadcast and discussion on the innovative theological concept of “The Rapture” can be found at the link below:

http://www.myocn.net/index.php/200905291729/Beyond-the-Veil/The-Rapture-An-Invention-of-Man.html

This is an extremely relevant conversation in our days due to the popularization of this novel concept, one that finds its origins in the US only in the early 1800s.

struggle

The struggle is very well characterized by its difficulty, by strain against personal unwillingness to act, by the empty sense of mental satisfaction born by good intentions and bold resolutions that are left unfulfilled. We can live believing in possibilities and potentialities, but belief in such is as false hope–belief that does not incur change in accordance with what is believed to be true. But the potentiality of the human person and its actualization is not only defined by action–this leads only to a self-motivated kind of accomplishment, to a good-intentioned-yet-egocentric self-discipline–but also by reception, by dependance upon the grace of revelation (that is, God’s self-revealing). Whether the individual sets forth a projection of sobriety and struggle only, or whether he holds to an unwavering discipline, all is meaningless apart from the simple willingness to first sit at the feet of Christ as one in need, and then, having received the life-giving commandment, to act in response and thereby actualize the endless potentiality of the human person. It is said: “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 Jn. 4), not “We gain self-control because He gained self-control.” And what is self-control but the ability to bring about the subordination of one’s own desires–to “crucify the flesh”–to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?
So the life–”The Way”–is defined by love, and the struggle is defined by action; mental struggle alone is deception (referred to as “prelest” by some among our forebears), physical struggle alone is literally an exercise in vanity. Struggle is not so much an act that aims at the end of attainment, it is an act of fulfillment, yes, a response to love that is itself an act of love. By choosing to persecute the ego through crucifying the flesh we begin to clean the interior “cave” of our soul, within which is a small “crib” where the Savior is to be born again and again, in simple humility, in a grandeur misunderstood by all but those who will admit that they are yet indistinct as a cave, but given the possibility to become the very birthplace of God by the Holy Spirit.

Funeral Dirge

“Thou only art immortal, who hast created and fashioned man. For out of the earth were we mortals made, and unto the earth shall we return again, as thou didst command when thou madest me, saying unto me: For earth thou art, and unto the earth shalt thou return. Whither, also, all we mortals wend our way, making of our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia”
(verse from the Canon–poetic hymn–sung at the Orthodox funeral service)

Is not all of my life such a wending, a movement toward the end? Inasmuch as it is, let the funeral dirge of all of my life be the song: “Alleluia.”

All the Gentiles

“‘Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will proclaim His way to us, and we shall walk in it.’”
–Isaiah 2

The “prolegomena,” the first things
In the first preaching of Christ we are told outrightly to “repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” this salvific exhortation is the beginning, and presents to us the disposition by which we avail ourselves to “the Way,” the Way itself not being the process of working out our salvation–repentance is the process–but Christ Himself is the Way, as He guides us quite directly in stating “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…” If repentance is the starting point and the process both, then there is also a precondition for the human person that he may even receive the exhortation: “repent.” The precondition is faith, the same faith as that held by the artificer of the altar “To the Unknown God” that St. Paul encountered in the Areopagus. The precursor to the beginning of our salvation is the acknowledgment of the limitation of our own knowledge, and such a humble awareness of it that it causes us to express the necessity of acknowledgment of what is beyond knowledge, of what cannot be fully known. This is a powerful precondition requiring a certain humility and awareness of need, a realization of the dependency that characterizes all of creation.
If we want to evangelize we may need to pray: “Prepare their hearts with such a precondition, O Lord!” We also must seek to become attuned to identifying such a condition in others, a fertile soil upon which the grain of wheat (Christ) may land and die, that it may rise therefrom to bear more fruit–the fruit of the resurrection.
It is easier to acknowledge-without-knowing, to have no mental bound in place regarding the Unknown, but this ease is insufficient, it can lean to a self-governed style of mysticism, an escapism from having to be attached to any concept aside from the limitlessness of unknowability, and ultimately diverts one from having a personal encounter with Love, that is, with the God Who made heaven and earth and all that is in it. So St. Paul addresses some “partial believers,” revealing to them the “Unknown” which has been so easily acknowledged, and he proclaims to them that the “Unknown” is “God, who made the world and everything in it…He is not far from each of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17).
In this “precondition” is the willingness of the person to entrust himself to the Life-Giver, and then the belief that knowledge can only be borne from trust. Trust is the laying up of oneself upon another–’I did not create myself and I do not uphold myself, but, rather, I am upheld’–that is, upon the One Who sourced the personhood of he who longs for true knowledge, the kind that is not possessed by the person and cannot be quantified.
Let us avidly pray for realization of the longing for true knowledge, first for ourselves, and then for all others. “Repent,” Christ calls out, and all who have ears to hear do respond, not judging of themselves any quality of worthiness to be among some group of those “chosen,” but responding so as to purely fix their eyes upon Christ, looking to Him with no need even to glance to the left or to the right. We begin with repentance, this “turning toward,” by which we come to fix our eyes upon the Savior, and find salvation not by progressing beyond this starting point but by abiding there, and also finding of ourselves the ever-present need to return in this way, to return to the “prolegomena,” that is, to the beginning.

Convenience

“…that which we call today convenience is in fact inconvenience. Convenience is for one to simplify one’s life and to limit its to the essentials. Then the person is liberated.”
–Elder Paisios the Athonite

trust…

“I did not create myself and I do not uphold myself, but, rather, I am upheld”

undisguised

Undisguised questions beckon undisguised answers, and I think that we are afraid of both.

“A man who gives way to his passions and suffers for it is like a man who is shot by an enemy, catches the arrow in his hands, and then plunges it into his own heart. A man who is resisting his passions is like a man who is shot at by an enemy, and although the arrow hits him, it does not seriously wound him because he is wearing a breastplate. But the man who is uprooting his passions is like a man who is shot at by an enemy, but who strikes the arrow and shatters it or turns it back into his enemy’s heart. As the psalmist says, ‘Their own sword shall enter their own heart and their bow shall be broken to pieces.’”
–Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings pg. 171

‘Tear from me the limb that causes me to sin!’

‘No. Remove it from yourself with prayer and fasting.’