Keeping in real in ’10

  • snowsunday_greg-n-clem.jpgWell, if my New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion had started off with bet­ter church atten­dance, I’d have been thwarted right off the bat. More snow fell last night and this morn­ing, and our intended trip to church became a very quick trip with a very slow U-turn in it. Not an entirely wasted effort, because if I had stayed in the house, I wouldn’t have got­ten to see that it was so cold out that the snow didn’t melt at all after it landed. And so you could make out indi­vid­ual shapes of snowflakes on the wind­shield. It’s the kind of thing that makes me squeal, and then grab the cam­era to see if there’s any way to cap­ture it. You sort of can … and that’ll have to do.
    snowwindshield_1.jpg

    snowwindshield_2.jpg

    And I have no way to segue from the weather report to my bor­ing lit­tle obser­va­tion about patris­tic read­ing, other than to say that I had been mean­ing to blog this and now have a Sun­day morn­ing unex­pect­edly free.

    Per­haps I can make a few gen­tle read­ers feel like they’ve got­ten a break as well if I say that I’m not going to spout rah-rah cheers for read­ing all the saints, ascetics, homileti­cians, the­olo­gians, hier­ar­chs, con­fes­sors and Church fathers that you can get your hands on in 2010. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s not the whole thing. Or, as some very gifted spir­i­tual elders advised:

    One who is tak­ing care for his sal­va­tion should not at all ask [the Elders, i.e., read Patris­tic books] for the acquir­ing only of knowl­edge … but it is most fit­ting to ask about the pas­sions and … how to be saved; for this is nec­es­sary and leads to salvation.

    Just as one clothed in beg­garly gar­ments might see him­self in sleep as a rich man, but on wak­ing from sleep sees him­self poor and naked, so also those who delib­er­ate about the spir­i­tual life seem to speak log­i­cally, but inas­much as that of which they speak is not ver­i­fied in the mind by any kind of expe­ri­ence, power and con­fir­ma­tion, they remain in a kind of fantasy.

    These days, when this read­ing is avail­able in any of our Ortho­dox book­stores, the dan­ger might be even greater. We get so impa­tient to have the ele­vated, tran­scen­dent state that we read about, and we can feel so far above every­one else in these deplorable times, that we sort of gloss over the most impor­tant part. And I could reach for a whole lot more quotes to say what that most impor­tant part is, but per­haps noth­ing says it as suc­cinctly as St. Seraphim of Sarov did to Motovilov: “The true aim of our Chris­t­ian life con­sists in the acqui­si­tion of the Holy Spirit of God.” (**)
    The two quotes I started with came from Ss. Barsanuphius and John, and from St. Mar­car­ius. I’ll men­tion that the book the quotes came from was a very good col­lec­tion called “Guid­ance Toward Spir­i­tual Life,(***)” trans­lated and edited by Fr. Seraphim Rose. But since even this book might be exactly the type of read­ing that is being referred to, we’ll all get to just take things one step at a time, right? Per­son­ally, if I read a lot less of this sort of thing in 2010 but digested a lot more of what I read and let it aid me every day, I’d have an incred­i­ble year ahead.

    And just in case I can’t man­age that, I’ll spread a lit­tle joy with Greg’s pic­ture of our snowy morning.

    snowweed.jpg

    Related posts:

    1. About med­i­ta­tion
    2. Keep­ing offenses in perspective
    3. The Crunchy Con is a Crunchy Convert
    4. Other quotes
    5. Shak­ing off Obliv­ion, rejoin­ing the real world

    January 3rd, 2010 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 01.03.2010

    Beau­ti­ful pho­tos, stay safe and thank you!

  • Ali

    These are very pretty pic­tures. And a nice reminder into the new year. I don’t really fall into the trap of read­ing too many Fathers, but I try to stay con­sis­tent with my Scrip­ture reading–and I tend to pump myself up because I think I know a lot. And all this read­ing means so lit­tle if I can’t put faith in action.

    Happy New Year!

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