Be Joyful: The Lord Is with You

by St Sophronios of Jerusalem



Leavetaking of the Annunciation and Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel

Anno Domini 2021, March 26



That is why I say to you, “Be joyful, you who are full of grace,” since you have been given more grace than all of creation; and I know and appreciate the reason for your joy and grace. That is why I go on to proclaim and cry out, “the Lord is with you.” The Lord, because as Creator He lords it over all creation, and with you because He is carried in your womb and is gestated in an inexpressible pregnancy. The Lord is with you, He who was begotten eternally from the Father and is always thought of with the Father, with you now in the conception, and achieving the awesome Incarnation through you. The Lord is with you, He who alone has a first eternal generation and receives a second birth through you. The Lord is with you, He who with the Father lords it over all creation, but from you puts on the form of a slave, thereby liberating mankind from slavery. This is why the Lord becomes a slave, in order to make the slave a lord by grace. The Lord is with you, He who was formerly outside of all creation, but now with you is seen as partaking of creation, and through you is counted among creatures; for in you the uncreated is created, and from you the Creator emerges as created; in you I see the uncreated become a creature and I behold the one without flesh becoming fully fleshed.


When He was above, sending me as messenger to you, Virgin, He was without flesh and body; but here below I see Him becoming flesh and body. Above, being uncreated, He transcended all creation; but here below I find Him to be a creature who became immutably a created being in you, Virgin. Above, I saw a God totally free of human element—for how could humanity be seen in heaven? No nonsense again from Origen! No madness from Didymos! No raging again from the followers of the furious Evagrios! These men expound empty myths, fantasize the prior existence of souls and make libations with the abominable Hellenes!—but here below I see Him becoming human without changing and a wonder within a wonder, because He is God beyond change and m an outside of understanding; He is double in nature, but not double in hypostasis, being one and the same in person; He is recognized in two natures, but not divided because of the duality of natures, nor—thanks to the sameness, unit, and absoluteness of hypostasis—creating a confusion of His constituent natures; nor does He increase the number of the heavenly Triad which rules over everything; and manifesting Himself to men as one of mankind, I find Him to be both God and man, and I am in awe of the magnitude of the miracle.


“Be joyful, you who are full of grace, the Lord is with you.” What could be more sublime than this joy, Virgin Mother? Or what could be more beautiful or more glorious than this grace, which you alone have received from God? Everything is secondary to your miracle, everything ranks lower than your grace, and everything that is judged excellent places second to you and obtains the lesser glory. God is with you, so who would dare to contend with you? God is from you, so who will not be immediately bested and will not rather declare joyfully your excellence and superiority? That is why I announce to you the greatest things, seeing your superiority among all creatures. Be joyful, you who are full of grace, the Lord is with you, for from you joy is not only bestowed on mankind, but is granted also to the powers in heaven.


“Truly you blessed among women,” for you turned the curse of Eve into a blessing; for you made Adam, who was at first accursed, to be blessed through you. Truly you are blessed among women, because the blessing of the Father came upon men through you and freed them from the ancient curse. Truly you are blessed among women, because through you your forbears are saved; for you will give birth to the Savior who will bestow divine salvation upon them. Truly you are blessed among women, because without seed you produced a fruit that will bestow blessings on the whole earth and will ransom it from the thorn-laden curse. Truly you are blessed among women, because being a woman by nature you will in face become the Mother of God; for if He who will be born from you is God incarnate in truth, you will be most justly called Mother of God as the one that truly gives birth to God.


*Excerpted from Sophronios of Jerusalem, Homilies, edited and translated by John M. Duffy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), pp. 181-185. Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.

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A New Universe, a New System of Stars: Why Babies are Necessary Icons for Us

By Mark C. Watney • August 25, 2026
Inside the head of my three-month-old granddaughter, Lucy, said G.K. Chesterton is, "a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation...a new system of stars, new grass, new cities...and new seas." And this is because, he adds: The gravity of astonishment at the universe...dwells in the eyes of a baby three-months-old [and] the universe is put upon its trial and forces us actually to remodel our conduct...we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope...[with] delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body. But Chesterton's central thesis in this essay is not that babies are so marvelous, but that our treatment of each other as adults, in contrast, is so broken. "It is our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong," he writes, because we no longer see each other with astonishment and wonder (unless, that is, we are falling in love). But babies remind us that humans really are astonishing, and this "revolutionary theory of the marvelousness of all things" should force us to "remodel our conduct" toward everyone we meet. A baby seems to be a necessary icon for us, correcting our eyesight which grows old and struggles to see "the weight of glory" in each other as teenagers, adults, and perhaps especially, as old people. Even though he did not reference icons in his essay, we seem to drift very easily into what could be called a type of iconoclasm, an inability to see each other as image bearers of God Himself. William Wordsworth describes us as "trailing clouds of glory" when we first arrive here "from God, who is our home." But soon, he says, "shades of the prison-house" begin to smother us, and we forget. "We bow to grown people," says Chesterton in this same essay, "take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly." God speaks to us, like we are working through in St. John of Damascus , through the "cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology," or literally from the spoken word (cataphatic) or unspeakable word (apophatic). Apophatic I noticed has the same root in Greek as Infant does in Latin. Both mean "unspoken." God has given us both bibles and babies, speechless wonders through which He means to unglaze our eyes and fill us with astonishment. MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies and Dordt College

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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

One Thing to Speak, Another to Know : Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 1

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 24, 2026
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? ​​​​​​​Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

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