Righteous Brothers Soul Masters Try Again ru
Your Eminence, Vladyka Hilarion, Your Eminence, Vladyka Jonah, Beloved Vladyka Nikolai, Reverend Fathers, it is a great joy to exist back with you afterwards not then long. I was besides here for a short visit in December, and it was squeamish to see some of y'all once more and at present to see many more of y'all. It's a real pleasure to come back to the Eastern American Diocese, where I e'er feel such a warm and loving reception is given to every guest and brother who comes to visit here.
I've been asked to speak on the Nifty Catechism of St. Andrew of Crete, and I will try my best to do and so, by your prayers.
In the proper noun of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Where shall I begin to lament the deeds of my wretched life?
What starting time fruits shall I offer, O Christ, for my nowadays lamentation?
But in Thy pity grant me release from my falls.
Come, my wretched soul,
and with your mankind confess to the Creator of all.
In future refrain from your former brutishness,
and offering to God tears in repentance.
Thus begins our familiar text read before our eyes in a familiar custom of our Orthodox life. As the Nifty Fast begins each year, its initial days are marked out by two defining features or characteristics. The first, the increased focus on the Psalter, which will remain constant throughout the entirety of the forty days; and the 2nd, the words of St. Andrew and the Corking Canon, which punctuate the evenings of the kickoff four days of the Fast and then return in their full form in the fifth week.
In that location is something unique, something astonishing nearly this text. Nonetheless many times we take heard information technology or read information technology before, each time it is encountered, each time its words, together with the special melodies that we sing, with the bows, the demeanor with which we feel them—each fourth dimension, they effect us in a remarkable fashion. We sense rightly, that in this text, which is non outwardly markedly different from the hundreds of other canons in our heritage which we recite every single day of the year, we are even so encountering something unique. We are called into a reality that extends far beyond ourselves. From the opening words sung by the choir to a special melody we realize that what is coming is something extraordinary. I'm sure you lot remember those words:
"God is my helper and Protector...", the choir sings,
...and He has become my salvation.
This is my God, and I will glorify Him.
The God of my fathers and I will exalt Him,
for gloriously has He been glorified.
(The first Irmos of the canon.)
My God.
My father'due south God.
My Helper, my Protector, my Salvation.
It is not likely that a liturgical text makes such sweeping pronouncements near its contents—more or less an unabridged confession of the God of our history, from our beginnings to our ends; from cosmos to redemption, from death into life. A text that evokes the whole ekonomia of salvation in such poignant terms, only to culminate in its penultimate petition with the strange weep:
Practice non require of me fruits worthy of repentance,
for my strength is spent in me.
| Grant me ever a contrite heart in spiritual poverty
that I may offer these gifts to Thee
as an acceptable sacrifice, O my only Savior.
How remarkable! How cute! That in a text that begins with the accuse to examine life, for the soul to make an accounting of herself, for a life to lean into the task of real repentance—that this text should conclude in this manner: seeking at the outset to make a first-fruit offer, and then at the conclusion discovering that the only acceptable sacrifice—brokenness, spiritual poverty, can be offered by the heart and genuinely brought to its Creator.
The Swell Canon of St. Andrew truly is a remarkable hymn. While, as I've mentioned already, in structure it is not dissimilar from hundreds of others, it is altogether unique. It addresses themes that are absent from no liturgical or theological text: repentance, redemption, humility, Divine Mercy; and yet it somehow touches on them in a way that affects us with unparalleled power. Whence this strength? Whence this unique grapheme? And, why it'due south central place in our Lenten life?
Rather than but commenting on various spiritual themes in the Canon, I would similar to look a little more securely at just what information technology is and how it works while we take a little time together here, an arroyo borne of a personal conviction on my part that the Great Canon teaches us—or ought to teach us—far more most our Orthodox life than we often requite it credit for, fifty-fifty though we may love information technology very dearly.
If we carefully examine the Bang-up Canon not only as a document, but in the whole context of the Holy Church's delivering of this text to us, and delivering us to this text, we see in it a guidepost for the very nature of our ascetical life, of our approach to the Holy Scriptures, and of the necessary work of our life of repentance.
Though the patriarchal throne in Jerusalem was vacant at the time, the locum tenens, Theodore, saw the immature monk's potential and piety; indeed, he became very well known to all for his chasteness, his chastity, his humility, and his doctrinal apprehending. And he made monk Andrew the Patriarchal Archdeacon there in the city of the Lord's Incarnate Sacrifice. In this function St. Andrew attended the Sixth Ecumenical Quango, which took place in the years 680 and 681, and he was at that place in an official chapters equally a member of a group of Representatives of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. In that location it was said of St. Andrew that, and I quote from his life, "the St. contended against heretical teachings, relying on his profound knowledge of Orthodox doctrine." He was likely only in his twenties. Afterward, following the decision of the Council with others in the Royal City having recognized his skills, he was transferred from Jerusalem to Constantinople permanently, and he became the Archdeacon of Hagia Sophia, among the highest clerical offices in the whole of the Orthodox globe, putting him at the side of emperors and patriarchs on a daily basis. But, in due course, even this exalted archdiaconal rank was not sufficient in the eyes of his superiors for the pious father Andrew, and under the reign of Emperor Justinian II he was appointed to the Metropolitanate of Gortyna in Crete, past which title we go on to remember him today.
Something particularly relevant for our understanding of the Canon however, merely without which we cannot empathise the Catechism, took place in the year 712. A "robber quango" was held, in which the decrees of the 6th Ecumenical Council—where again, St. Andrew had been present in an official capacity—the decrees of the Council and the Quango as a whole were rejected, the Devil attempting to strike a accident confronting the Church'due south confession of truth in the face of the heresy of Monothelitism.
St. Andrew, for reasons that we practise non fully understand, took part in this robber quango, accustomed it and endorsed its heretical rejections of Constantinople Iii. What stirred St. Andrew to this rebellion against the Faith we simply practice non know; he was not the only bishop to do so. What we do know is that the following yr, in 713, he came to himself, he repented of his error, and was received dorsum into the fullness of Orthodoxy.
From this point his life begins to be marked out past an excess of composition, chiefly of hymns, and alongside other significant names such every bit St. John of Damascus, [and] St. Germanos of Constantinople, St Andrew is by and large given credit for inventing the particular class of a hymn known as a "catechism", with which we are likewise familiar today, a transformation of the far older practice of but singing the Biblical Odes at Matins into a series of reflections interjected as hymns between the verses of those Odes, which, every bit we know, eventually would come to replace the Odes altogether except during Lent. And it'southward during the same period, of course, that he composes the most famous of all his works, our Great Canon.
St. Andrew wrote perhaps xx-iv canons in full, but there is none quite similar this particular composition. We have to recollect that great tragedy of his life. Only a few years before—nosotros don't know the exact year of his death—but it's possible he died as early every bit 726, which would mean he had fewer than fourteen years of life between his expose of God and the Organized religion and the Church at the robber council, and his subsequent repentance, and ultimately his repose. And it is in this context—of a homo who had ascended from the deplorable lot of a mute kid to the highest offices of Regal Orthodoxy; from the condition of an unknown to the pastor of thousands of souls, who had nevertheless denied his Savior in the most vile of ways, yet had been rescued from his error by that same God and called dorsum to His service—that St. Andrew pens the Great Canon.
That is to say, his Canon of Repentance was non a theoretical work of a writer trying to explore themes that he felt were important for dogmatic or principled reasons.
The Keen Catechism is a cry of an anguished heart. St. Andrew had been lifted up by God far beyond annihilation he could take deserved or expected and even so he had rejected Him. He had received grace upon grace, and and so he had spurned the Giver of grace. So, in an act of redemption over which St. Andrew conspicuously spent the rest of his life in utter awe, the same Lord he had rejected and spurned received him back. I do not think it's too dramatic to say that this experience radically altered St. Andrew's life, his idea, and his spiritual vision. Conspicuously he knew the teachings of the Church very well, and for very many years. One does not become an official representative at a Council, much less a Metropolitan Archbishop, without knowing the dogmas of the Faith. He knew, or he idea he knew most the reality of sin, of rebellion, repentance, redemption—of class, he did. And yet in his feel of betrayal—of his betrayal of his Lord—everything changed for St. Andrew.
He no longer knew about sin in terms of observation or intellectual comprehension. He knew it start and foremost and forever afterwards by the drama of his fall. He no longer needed to intellectualize what it meant to experience the dung pit of the Prodigal—he had cast himself into the dung of apostasy; he could taste that mud in his teeth. He no longer needed to hypothesize well-nigh the weeping of the soul, and the peril of the cocky-abandonment of God—those tears he had wept himself. He had felt that darkness and he had felt, as well, the unexpected mercy of God's dear.
St. Andrew no longer needed to speculate nigh how a soul must feel standing before the Only Judgment with nothing to offering in its defense. He had tasted and experienced a foretaste of that judgment, and he had been able to offer zippo apart from his repentance, and with that the Lord had picked him up.
It was that tragedy that contradistinct St. Andrew's heart. Out of a dogmatist, it created a hymnographer; out of a career cleric, a witness; not just a preacher, but a witness of repentance. Simply that tragedy and its resolution led to another cracking tragedy in St. Andrew's life, one that he appears to have even less understood, one he could not explain. In the face of all the grace that his soul had experienced, of all that he had concretely and experientially come to know, the inexplicable happened inside him: his soul seemed to forget. He did non forget, not intellectually, not historically, just that was precisely what tormented St. Andrew. He could remember his autumn; he could retrieve the Lord'south mercy, and yet deep within him, in the inner recesses of his middle, his soul seemed non to remember to repent, to conduct on with a life of repentance. He could tell himself to do and then, simply his soul didn't seem to listen.
Seeing this in reference to Biblical lives (a trait that I'll come back to in a moment), St. Andrew realized that while others repented and were forever altered in the depths of their soul, was did not. To put this in his own words:
Running through all who lived earlier the Law, my soul,
you lot have non been like Seth,
nor take yous imitated Enos nor Enoch,
nor Noah, but y'all are seen to be insufficient of the life of the righteous.
Or in comparing the cleansing of the soul following God's mercy to the eradication of the memories of Egypt among those led by God out of that bondage into the new state, St. Andrew would sing:
Y'all, wretched soul,
have non struck and killed your Egyptian minds similar the real Moses.
Say then, how volition you lot dwell in that desert solitude,
where the passions desert you through repentance?
And so, the Great Canon is composed in response to this new tragedy in St. Andrew'south heart. He has learned what repentance means; what information technology has to mean. And as he feels his soul numbed past insensitivity, by a lack of perception, past a dismissal of memory, he calls her back to what is truly needful. It'south been said that the approximately two hundred and 50 troparia of this Catechism—the numeration varies a little bit in dissimilar manuscripts—that they were composed as a personal reflection on the part of St. Andrew, but I've ever found this to be a little misleading. The hymn is composed out of St. Andrew's spiritual necessity: He needed to stir his soul back to life, and with it surely, the souls of his flock whom he knew must endure similarly. And if such a return to life did not become his soul he knew very well what hell awaited him. And then he crafted this dialogue between himself and his soul with God watching on, that earlier his time ran out, he might come up to himself over again in the depth of his eye.
"Brief is my lifetime," he cries out in the Great Canon,
and full of pain and wickedness,
just accept me in penitence
and call me back to the awareness of Thee.
The Great Catechism is, above all else, a cry—the weep of a center that speaks to every eye. A cry to stop the course, before the world finishes us. A cry to run across the world and ourselves as they actually are, and not to remain stagnant anymore.
Before I plough to a few of the key themes in the Canon, a brief give-and-take should exist said, I think, on how the Church brings the canon to us, and brings us to the Nifty Catechism.
We see it, equally I've said already, in the first four days of Clean Week, divided into 4 parts, the precise arrangements of which are a remarkable instance of ecclesiastical abbreviation, and are not at all obvious in their construction. If you think they simply take the Canon and divide it into quarters and share it out each day, spend a little time studying, and you'll find that's non at all how it works. I have marked upwards my English re-create if any of you are interested, to come across that the Catechism is significantly reordered and restructured in those four days. And then of grade we meet information technology in its full course on the Thursday, in practical usage, Wednesday evening of the Fifth Week. These prescriptions are laid down for u.s.a. in the latest version of the Lenten Triodion reflecting the significant alterations to Lenten practise that took place importantly in the ninth and the twelfth centuries.
In earlier versions of the Triodion, just for your curiosity, the thematic span of the Fast was organized rather differently. For example the outset Sunday of Great Lent was dedicated to the Holy Prophets; the theme of the Fourth Dominicus was the Adept Samaritan; the scriptural readings throughout Lent were different, and customs throughout varied as well.
In the form that was ultimately settled upon, which was largely a monastic ustav for the fast and largely that of the Studios Monastery in Constantinople, the Great Canon came to be an integral part of the Lenten podvig on the days I take indicated. This means in essence that the Church building has deemed the Canon an appropriate text for two phases of our Lenten repentance: its initiation, and the push towards its determination. By it we enter into the spirit of the Fast at the showtime, and in the fifth calendar week we tie it to the reading of the life of St. Mary of Egypt, linking her instance of a repentance that endures to the end to this case of what repentance must truly be.
And, the Church not simply prescribes when we shall run across the Great Canon, just how. It is recited in our tradition equally a kliros text; that is to say, information technology is not proclaimed from the Ambon, the way we proclaim the Anathemas or even regular homilies. It is read from the kliros, though past tradition we move the kliros into the eye of the temple. Monks wear just their mantias, white clergy simply their ryassas, together with the minimal liturgical vestry required in our tradition of a priest performing whatever office; that is to say, priests wear the epitrachilion (priest's stoleÑŽ—Ed.); the bishops wear also the modest omophor (bishop's stole.—Ed.).
We stand barren in the heart of the temple, every bit the soul stands barren in the middle of our hearts. We close the Majestic Gates to remind ourselves of the separation that we are meant to feel, and oftentimes ignore. We keep the space nighttime, usually lit only past the candles in our hands, making visual the mystery of the darkness of sin, but never letting u.s. despair that the calorie-free of Christ is not close to u.s., with united states of america, and so nosotros bow, and we bow, and we bow. Three times for each of the ii hundred and fifty troparia, downwards to the earth, totaling some seven hundred and fifty prostrations—bows rather—in improver to all the usual prostrations of the Lenten service. Of course, in exercise, this is often one bow per troparion; the practice of 3 bows, of course, dates from a time when all of the verses of the Catechism were sung. There was significantly more time to brand tedious bows without information technology becoming a rushed aerobical feat, as it sometimes is. I often experience it is better to do 1 bow, peacefully, slowly, and with reverence than to blitz 3 simply for form. The Church teaches u.s.a. to do these physical things and it is of import that they be washed, because she perceives for us—she preserves for us—the ancient wisdom of the Church Fathers, that where the heed may not go of its own accord, much less the heart, they can exist led through the disciplined movements of the body. And if you lot've ever tried to read the Canon without making any bows or Crosses, merely on your own, it is a very different experience than ascetically encountering it the way we practice in the Church.
As well significant is the way the Smashing Catechism is inserted into our Lenten services. In Clean Calendar week, its four segments are inserted into the evening service of Great Compline just afterwards Psalm 69 at the beginning of the service. Nosotros might take notation of the most obvious aspect of the integration of the Canon at this betoken. The Psalm that precedes information technology is one that implores God to help:
O God, be attentive unto helping me,
O Lord, brand haste to assistance me
I am poor and in demand.
O Lord, come up to my aid.
And so, nosotros start the Canon. The 3 Psalms that immediately follow remind the states of the fact that God listens to our supplications:
When I chosen upon Thee, O God of my righteousness
Thou didst hearken unto me.
I accept hoped in Thy mercy
and my soul will rejoice in the Lord.
And then later additional psalmody we are brought to the central hymn of Compline, "God is with the states" (С нами Бог). Over and again this discussion of alleviation and triumph is sung to the heart that has only heard so much of trial, and then much of weakness, and so much of struggle. We could be daunted by the grief of our sin, simply God is with us. We could sink into despondency, to the night reality of our rebellion, merely God is with us. We could lose all hope, nosotros could be conquered by our frailty, simply God is with us. Information technology is a sorrowful affair to observe, I should say, when in some places the reading of the Great Catechism on these evenings is the just portion of the service washed carefully and with total attending—the balance of content beingness swiftly—sometimes inattentively—read or served. We should remember that the Canon's theology—its spirit and its ascetical witness—culminate in what follows, particularly in the singing of God is with us.
When we see the Great Canon in [the] 5th Week, every bit we will do very soon, information technology is incorporated into the evening commemoration of Matins. There information technology follows the reading of Psalm fifty, the smashing psalm of a repentant heart which itself has been made to follow the reading of the outset portion of the life of St. Mary of Egypt, just fifty-fifty on this evening the Catechism is not read straight through. After the Tertiary Ode comes the balance of St. Mary'southward life, and then we brainstorm to interject the cute ii three-ode canons, 1 by St. Joseph the Archbishop of Thessaloniki, and the other of St. Theodore—two brothers both in the flesh and in the spirit of Studion who equanimous the three-ode canons in the Triodion. Each of these Odes, since they relate to Th's Churchly focus in general, are well-nigh the Twelve Apostles, and these canons will, as usual, also appear at the Eighth and the Ninth Odes. Subsequently the Sixth, we insert the Beatitudes, which in our normal exercise don't figure in this place in Matins. And following the example of the Canon itself, we intersperse the verses of the Beatitudes with troparia of repentance which link these themes to Biblical examples.
If we take a moment to stand dorsum and examine this layout, this structure, this unique organization, we see the Church building has presented the repentant spirit of the Great Canon as a kind of connecting link betwixt the life of i of her greatest ascetics, the Apostolic witness of Christ's redemptive piece of work, and the Savior's own declaration of the blessedness of His Kingdom. St. Mary's life tin can seem stark, barren, to ane who reads it without wisdom; but linked to the Canon, we are able to see, as it were, into her middle, and observe the spiritual realities anything but arid, that led her into her desert repentance. The longed-for redemption of the Catechism is tied to the testimony of the Holy Apostles that God sent not His Son into the world to condemn information technology, but to relieve information technology, and when the Canon itself speaks directly of the hope that will come, the Church building links this explicitly to Christ.
It'south telling that the final regular troparion of the Sixth Ode reads:
I am the coin with the Majestic image
which was lost of old, O Savior.
Simply now light Thy lamp, Thy Precursor, O Word,
seek and find Thine epitome.
And information technology is this verse that we follow with the insertion of the Beatitudes. St. Andrew hopes for the conservancy that will be brought past the One that the Precursor proclaims, and immediately we hear that One speak of the Kingdom, that is the redemption of all transgression:
In Thy Kingdom remember united states of america, O Lord…
All of this goes to show that this text, in the Church's heed, is not only to be read, or even heard. It is to be encountered. We are called to experience it. We are chosen to feel the grief and heartache of the recognition of our lack of repentance, hence the liturgical setting, the ascetical acts of prostration. Non to experience these things emotionally, or emotively, but dispassionately, taking stock of our lives equally they really are, but only inside the embrace of the Church building's abiding conviction in the mercy of Him Who, as the holy Evangelist says, takes away the sin of the world.
In this spirit, in this context, St. Andrew is given rein to speak to us. But, ironically, this is not what he seems to wish, and information technology is certainly not the way his hymn works. Information technology doesn't speak to united states of america at all—information technology aims to speak for the states, or perhaps even that is slightly inaccurate—its deepest aim is to draw us into its spirit, so that its words become our ain words.
Just as the prayers contained in the prayer book are meant to teach us the mode a heart should weep to God in daily prayer, to instruct us in the kind of words that our own hearts should issue along, then the Corking Canon speaks inside us as we ought to speak. Information technology gives us, every bit if on a kind of loan, the words that would emerge from within each of our hearts, if only we would take seriously what repentance really means, simply which we so often do not find brimming from our lips, deadened to the spiritual reality by our laxity, and our worldliness, and our distraction.
Thus, the Church seems to say: the Great Canon is written and read in the first person, not just for St. Andrew, but for all of u.s..
"Where shall I begin to lament?" we sing.
"I am the one who by my thoughts fell amongst robbers."
"I am the coin with the Purple image which was lost of onetime."
"The alabaster jar of my tears, O Savior, I pour out on Thy head equally perfume."
I desire to dwell on this commencement-person reality for just a moment, since every bit all of u.s. clergy, and all attentive laity know, that this is a regular feature of our Divine Services. Though, yes, we do often speak historically of the by, in our hymns very regularly, we find our liturgical experience is set into the first person.
I see the crucifixion of Christ
and what's more I see information technology today.
I behold the empty tomb.
I witness the resurrection.
And thus, in the Great Canon, I sing to my soul, through the word spoken by the priest; St. Andrew's ain words. And while this is always a powerful element in our prayer, information technology is perchance nowhere moreso than in this hymn, for it is precisely this that gives the Great Canon that tangible sense of say-so that I mentioned at the outset, because I am given to sense, if just for a few minutes of my circumspect participation, something that I long for, something that my heart and soul deeply crave. Though I may not live a life of worthy repentance, nevertheless, something with in me longs to, cries out to, and by being drawn into this hymn of experience, for a moment I am given to taste firsthand of the glories of that repentant life that I then often neglect on my ain.
In this worldly life, people will often expend cracking energy, time and money to accept kickoff-manus tastes of things that they might do in total if they could. Men volition climb false walls to experience a taste of the thrill of scaling hundred-meter cliffs; they volition pay to go into wind chambers to experience a taste of the freefall of a skydive they may never brand. They will go into flight simulators to taste the feel of flying a jet over the clouds.
But far deeper than these worldly longings, are the needful desires of the soul. And the soul longs to live in real repentance, to truly experience Divine Mercy, and for a few moments this Great Canon permits the soul of that experience.
She tastes, for a time she tin can touch, the blissful reality of 18-carat, heartfelt, deepest repentance, and that season securely changes her. It's for this reason that the Great Canon, though filled with so much dismal and discouraging imagery, has the effect of leaving those who feel it in the divine services filled, not with dread or darkness, just with a sense of lightness, fifty-fifty of dispassionate joy. We touch for a time on realities that we fail to truly seek in our own lives, and the fact that we can taste them, that we can feel them, infuses the soul with a new zeal and the want to make a existent kickoff in the spiritual life.
In this context, St. Andrew is a resource, and provides us with access to an enormous series of critical observations and points on our necessarily ascetical life as Orthodox Christians. Our vision must change if we are to take hold of the reins of repentance, and that change must exist made by force, as the Lord Himself said is the trait of those who inherit His Kingdom; that wrestling, that forceful alter of listen, heart and life must convert our soul to see certain realities to which we are usually bullheaded.
I take time today to dwell only on a few, so I'll select 3 of the ascetical themes in the Great Canon that I feel are of the about significance to us. First and foremost is St. Andrew's consistent conviction that my sin is greater than any other's and by their lesser sins, I see my greater ones. This is summed upward by St. Andrew's words in Ode Three:
I alone take sinned against Thee,
and I have sinned above all men
O Christ my Savior, spurn me not.
But a few troparia later:
At that place is no 1 who has sinned among men
whom I accept non surpassed past myself.
Or in the 4th Ode, even more poignantly:
There has never been a sin or deed or vice in life
that I have non committed, O Savior.
I have sinned in heed, discussion,
in choice, in purpose, will and action
as no ane else has ever done.
It should exist said that at that place are many people who accept a problem with this kind of linguistic communication. Some consider this degree of self-deprecation to exist excessive. "Have I really gone about and slaughtered towns the way some of the old historical figures did?" "Have I really committed murder?" "Practise I actually have blood on my hands?" "Am I actually worse than Cain?"
Simply St. Andrew teaches us that unless we are able to meet that even the greatest of sinners demonstrate the shadows of virtues that nosotros do not ourselves possess, unless nosotros are genuinely to place ourselves below them, and see in their vile acts, not the other, but the unadmitted and the unacknowledged realities of what is scandalously familiar to us, we volition never exist able to learn from them what matters for our redemption.
Hither is a typical instance in St. Andrew'due south ain words, from the 7th Ode:
"David once joined sin to sin," he writes,
for he mixed adultery with murder.
Yet he immediately offered a double repentance.
But yous, O my soul,
have done things more wicked than he
without repenting to God.
Again some ask, "Have I really committed murder and adultery?"
Perchance not in the manner that King David did. But the Savior has taught us deeper meanings to both sins, "for whoever hateth his blood brother is a murderer," He says, "and whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Let us not see only fleshly outward things and use them as excuses to deny the spiritual sin within united states of america. I may not accept killed, but that does not hateful I am not a murderer. I may not have committed marital infidelity, just this does not mean I am non an adulterer.
And still St. Andrew's point is non simply to force us to admit that we accept washed grievous things, even more grievous than King David, but to assistance us see the deeper tragedy inside us, that he genuinely repented of his sins… while I have not. The great king made two mistakes, grievous! And yet, he altered the whole of his life in response. Yet I pile sin upon sin, spiritual, and far more serious than his. And what does my barren soul practice? Information technology makes excuses. It pretends it was justified. It downplays its wrong-doing and does everything in its power to explicate it away.
Once more and again, this theme is repeated in the Groovy Canon. Just one more example will exist enough:
"Having emulated Uzziah in my soul," he says:
You lot take his leprosy in you doubled,
for you lot call back icky thoughts
and practice outrageous things.
Let go of what yous are holding, my soul,
and run to repentance.
This leads St. Andrew to pen what is one of his most startling and meaning verses. I'm sure you accept noticed it earlier; it comes from the 9th Ode of the Great Canon:
Christ became human being
and called to repentance robbers and harlots.
Apologize, O my soul!
The door to the Kingdom is already open
and the transformed Pharisees, publicans, and adulterers
are entering into it alee of you.
For all that we may claim—piety or virtue, faithfulness or strictness, here we behold the reality that those whom the earth might say, or in our debased pride nosotros might be tempted to say, those who are far worse than united states—these very ones are inbound the Kingdom of God ahead of us. We spend so much time during the Great Fast focusing on these very categories, these types of people—the Pharisees, the publicans, the grievous sinners.
"Let us abscond from the proud speaking of the Pharisee," we say on the Lord's day dedicated to him and the Publican, "allow united states hate the boastful words of the Pharisee."
And yet for all that, nosotros see in the epitome of the Pharisee that nosotros are meant to avert, hither is the existent truth of the matter: that such ones are entering into the Kingdom, while I am non. For they ultimately repent, while I stay stalwart in my sin, or deadened to real repentance. This is the first ascetical theme that I would wish to draw out of the Catechism.
The second is that the sin in my life, for all of its weight and enslaving strength, is not to be identified with my real humanity, with my created being. The despondency that too often follows upon the realization of sin, specially when that realization comes through purely secular or heterodox ways—this despondency comes in large part with the confusion of the conflation of my sin with my nature. This is amidst the greatest sorrows of Protestant and some forms of Roman Cosmic deviation from the teachings of the Church building: that sin starts to be seen as a constituent office of our fallen nature, in which information technology cannot exist separated from who I am, and thus who I am becomes a bleak dismal thing. What hope can there exist of transformation, if the very nature of what I am, is sinner, and sinful—what purpose to the ascetic life at all?
The Great Canon, in concert with the Holy Fathers before and subsequently, speaks, as we might expect, in entirely unlike terms. One of its earliest metaphors for our sinful condition is that of nakedness.
"I have lost my starting time-created beauty," St. Andrew sings,
and comeliness,
and I now lie naked and I am aback.
My nature is naked. The fashion in which it ought to exist clothed—holiness, incorruption, sanctity, has been cast bated, that the epitome of God's very being is no longer so visible in me. Merely what is lost is non destroyed: it is cast away; it is cached. He sings again in the Second Ode:
I accept buried with passions
the beauty of the original image, O Savior,
only seek now and find it,
as you found the lost money.
This is essential. This is what brings the states hope in our ascetical life, because what is buried tin can be dug upward, but as a man who is naked tin can be clothed. His nakedness is not an amending of his beingness, it is a status of his existence.
And this is precisely how the Church teaches us to understand our sin. It fundamentally alters how we exist. Naked, we become frail, susceptible to the winds and the snow, and the rains—icons of something other than perfect holiness. We suffer. We die. Just there is always hope to exist clothed again to unbury the pristine paradigm. In this light, St. Andrew speaks of sin equally a kind of new wear, wretched in its nature. Rather than the virtuous clothing of piety, we have chosen instead to cover our self in garments of shame.
"I am wrapped in a garment of shame as with fig leaves," he writes, "in reproof of my selfish passions." Or, a little after, "I am clad in a coat that is spotted and shamefully blood-stained by the menses of my passionate and pleasance-loving life."
The effect of such new clothing is that we are burdened by information technology; weighed down by it.
"All the demon chiefs," he says,
of the passions
have ploughed my back
and long has their tyranny over me lasted.
I have fallen under the brunt of the passions
and the corruption of matter,
and from and then until now
I am oppressed past the enemy.
These observations lead into the third disquisitional ascetical point in the Bang-up Catechism: that the life of repentance must be a life of action. And this is driven by the seriousness with which St. Andrew sees sin, and that unfailing sureness, surety! That sin can exist forgiven, and that our dark lives can be made bright once again.
Modern emotionalism has led to the emotionalization of both sin and repentance. "Sin is what makes me feel bad, and repentance is a change of feeling or thinking then that I will think differently. I'll be distressing, I'll pledge myself to recall and experience in a new manner."
If St. Andrew speaks near emotion or feeling in the Great Canon, it is but with regard to engendering that necessary pinprick of attrition in the center, that stirs it to life; to cause the sorrow or grief to spur us into action.
But, it is on precisely that, the action of repentance, that he dwells without cessation. Stagnancy kills repentance. Those who stand idle, or worse, look backwards, are not repenting—they are dying.
"Do not be a colonnade of salt, my soul," the Canon sings,
by turning dorsum,
just let the example of the Sodomites frighten y'all,
and take upward refuge in Zoar.
This prototype is repeated many times. With it the focus on real ascesis every bit a race, something that is to be run.
"Run, my soul!" St. Andrew says,
Run like Lot from the fires of sin.
Run from Sodom and Gomorrah;
R un from the flame of every irrational desire.
This is another amongst the many reasons that the Church has chosen the Canon to exist so primal to our liturgical life during Bully Lent, considering it does non talk most repentance merely emotionally, or theoretically. Its primal command to each of us is that our repentance must be active. It must be the piece of work of a life lived differently, of a race run faithfully without tiring; of an ascesis that is fired by the conviction that the harsh wear of sin tin be cast off; that the discarded garments of grace can be restored; and that the beast of the passions hunched over our backs can be slaughtered by the power of the Holy Trinity, and that God'due south image may be renewed in us.
The Canon'southward ascesis is thus profoundly hopeful. And this is why we hear the words and feel joy in our hearts, because for all that it observes the tragedy of our condition, its abiding bulletin is that we can change and we can go glorious once again.
Before I depict to a close, I desire to say merely a few words about the Not bad Canon as a witness to the Orthodox approach to the Holy Scriptures. This text is, later on all, as we've already seen in numerous ways from the quotations that I take given, remarkably scriptural, having earned the nickname "a survey of the Former and New Testaments"—a nickname that is near spelled out by St. Andrew himself. He cries out,
I have reviewed Moses' account of the creation of the globe, my soul,
and thus all the approved Scriptures.
(By "canonical Scriptures," he, like virtually of the Fathers, refers to the Old Testament)
and at present I am bringing before y'all
examples from the new scriptures…
(That is to say the New Testament)
…to lead y'all into compunction.
Just what I'd like to signal out only briefly, is that what is of supreme value in the Catechism in this regard is non simply that it quotes the Scriptures at almost every poetry, but rather that it demonstrates the acme of our Orthodox understanding of how the Holy Scriptures are to be interpreted past a pious heart.
This Diocese harbors the main Seminary of our Church building, which many of you have attended, at which some of you teach, so I know that I can brand passing reference without too many blank stares, to the well-known ancient schools, and then-called, of Scriptural interpretation, known as the Alexandrian, with its accent on allegorical readings of the Scriptures, and the Antiochian, with its preference for literal readings. That neither of these schools actually existed as such nevertheless, the fact is that nosotros know there have ever been a variety of ways of studying our sacred texts, of reading them, of interpreting them.
We know also, of many newer ways that have emerged over the centuries of Christian dissolution exterior the Church building: the once much-touted source-critical method which I'k certain many of yous learned in various contexts, for a fourth dimension favored past Protestant scholars and almost everybody else; since largely fallen into carelessness; or, the nonsensical historical Jesus motion or the Jesus Seminar, an approach that was rejected by absolutely everyone later on a flash-in-the-pan appearance in the 1980'south.
While the Orthodox Church certainly rejects these aberrational ways of trying to read the Scriptures, she has always acknowledged, and we run into readily in the writings of the Holy Fathers, that multiple means or styles of reading and interpretation can be beneficial for the soul. The Scriptures tin can exist studied for their literality, for their spiritual message, or their allegory. These tin can exist mingled together; they can exist held separately. And then long equally such report is done within the embrace of the Church building, guided by her, rather than swaying abroad from her and condign led by not-ecclesiastical principles, wisdom tin can come.
But what all such approaches accept in common, is that they are methods of written report. The text is a document. It is something other. It is examined, ruminated upon, interpreted. And, this is good. But, it is not all and it is not the highest manner.
In the Keen Canon of St. Andrew we encounter Scripture, non studied, simply appropriated. This, in our Orthodox life, is the highest grade of encounter with the Holy Scriptures—when they terminate to be something studied, and instead are transformed—non by intellectual endeavor, but by a deep interior ascesis into the cry of our ain hearts. The story of the Scriptures is, in the mystical way, the story of my life. Though they each retain their historical realities and significance, the Church leads the states to discover that the individuals of the Quondam Attestation, similar the New, live in a manner that is revelatory to my centre.
David repents, to show me repentance. The command to articulate the Promised Land of the Canaanite tribes is a command for my ascesis, to clear the promised state of my center from every sin and passion. The departing of the Ruby Bounding main is the path of my salvation, demonstrating how and by what ways, namely Holy Baptism, I should be let out of bondage and into the fullness of life. And then I look at their story and I see my own. Abel, Cain, Noah, Uzziah, Lamech, David, Solomon, fifty-fifty Pharaoh—they are all me. Their stories are mine—at to the lowest degree in office—and again, this is not considering they are mere metaphors or, God foreclose the thought!—simply non-historical allegories. They are existent people. Just the One Body of Christ extends beyond the whole of History, and I gradually learn that my life is tied together with theirs, and theirs reveals mine. I can learn from their mistakes, because their mistakes are live in my heart, and I can learn from their repentance, because that, too, is available to me, if just I would rise up and seize it.
I don't take time to say more about the Scriptural significance of the Canon. Let me only to make this 1 statement: that in my interpretation, every Orthodox grade on the study of the Holy Scriptures should have this hymn, the Great Canon as its start text, earlier students fifty-fifty open up the Bible itself. For hither, we accept the Scriptures presented in the heed of the Church building through her own heart, with her vocalism. This is one of St. Andrew's virtually remarkable theological accomplishments. Here, we are shown how to read, how to hear, and what to receive. If the Groovy Canon is the first text that we read in the study of Scripture, then when we open the Bible to the first folio of Genesis or to Matthew, everything that follows volition appear to us differently.
I would like to end past one time again looking at the opening Irmos of the Canon that I quoted at our get-go:
God is my Helper and my Protector,
He has go my salvation.
This is my God and I will glorify him,
my father's God,
and I will exalt him,
for gloriously hath he been glorified.
This is the fervent conviction of St. Andrew, and information technology is the ceaseless confession of our Holy Mother Church—that the God of our fathers is glorified, and in a beautiful mode, every verse of the Canon that follows is a revelation of how God is glorified. Information technology is non in diadems of power, or reign, or fame, of exaltation. Yep, God is glorified in such things, of form, simply he is gloriously glorified above all in the repentance of his children, in their coming to him with ascetical hearts intent on becoming new lives.
God's truest glory is thus man's sweetest promise. What he seeks and what we seek, or ought to seek—these are the same. The shepherd'south greatest joy is in finding his lost sheep, and the wayward sheep's truest sugariness is again beholding the face and hearing the voice of its master. St. Andrew reminds usa of precisely this.
M art the Good Shepherd.
Seek me, Thy lamb,
and neglect me not who have gone astray.
Thou art my sugariness Jesus.
Yard art my Creator,
in Thee, O Savior, shall I be justified.
My dear fathers! The race of repentance is not over; it is happening now. Information technology will happen until the day of your expiry and you must run it well, broken in heart, all the same blithesome in spirit, for at the end of this race is that image that was lost, the glory that was shunned, and the gates of the Kingdom that take already been opened to repentant sinners and which may yet be opened unto the states.
I'll end non with the words of St. Andrew, merely with those of St. Theodore the Studite, who, as I mentioned, is the author of i of the canons inserted into our Lenten cycle, and of that which we intermingle with the Swell Canon on the Wednesday of the soon-to-come Fifth Week. Referring the repentant life to the Churchly witness, St. Theodore says the following words intermingled with St. Andrew'southward:
O God-chosen band of the Twelve Apostles,
offering now especially prayer to Christ,
that we may all finish the course of the Fast,
completing our prayers with compunction,
zealously practicing the virtues,
that nosotros may achieve to see the glorious Resurrection of Christ our God;
offer Him celebrity and praise,
at present and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Give thanks yous for listening to the special broadcast edition of the Pastoral Research Plan in the Eastern American Diocese. Please visit us on the Spider web at www.eadiocese.org. Thank yous, and God anoint you.
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