The Fathers - Part I
Saints Who Show Us What Man Is Able To Become
by Archimandrite Vasileios
Feast of St Stephen, Archdeacon and First Martyr
When you approach them, you find a spontaneous offering of the truth which sets free. You find life, honesty, confession, humility, the wealth of the spirit, the ascension of the flesh, the transfiguration of the world, the illumination of the opaque, the meaning of the insignificant, the grace of eternity spread over the everyday and ordinary, man given his true value, the cooling-fiery furnace of the Divine Liturgy in which all things have been with a light which transfigures them: it makes them all fire. It makes them all cooling dew. The Fathers, full of grace as they are, move about freely. They speak personally. They scatter blessing. They tolerate everyone (in their strictness). They know everyone through their love. They love everyone with the love of the one God in Trinity, who is love. They love everyone, because they themselves are love. Through them you know that the Orthodox Church lives the truth as a communion of love. It honors communion as a manifestation of the trinitarian deity. It respects man as a person in communion.
And God the Word goes outside Himself and comes to dwell in all through His intense longing, that all may become partakers of His grace and His divinity. He does not come to advertise the wealth of His divinity and reveal our worthlessness and poverty. Instead, He becomes poor, though He was rich, so that by His poverty we might become rich (2 Cor. 8.9). He becomes man and takes on everything that is ours, apart from sin, so as to give us everything that is His, apart from identity in essence. So that all may become sons of God and gods by grace.
This self-emptying, as a work of unfathomable love, is a theophany – a revelation of the truth of God as a communion of persons who love each other.
This is the gospel of the new creation, the message of life which the Fathers proclaim by their existence. They show the way of existence. And they teach you how to live, to write, to organize.
They allow everything to move freely. They wait for the other person to find his own rhythm, to find his path. They sacrifice their lives, in the likeness of the God-man, for the life of the other. They pour out grace. They hide their virtue out of modesty. They know that everything true is given from above. They have given to God what little they had. And they have received everything. They receive it constantly, they accept it without ceasing. And they cannot bear the abundance of life. They want to withdraw to the sidelines, to be quiet, to vanish, to calm down, not to be commented on. All they want is for others to live.
This reality of the dawning of grace as a divine gift is something greater than all the glories and honors of the world.
They are somewhere else. The root of their being is watered by mystical streams. They receive a strange consolation. They live amidst the origin of worlds: “When the stars came into being, all my angels praised me” (Job 38.7, LXX). God “works until now” (Jn. 5.17) bringing about the salvation of the world; and the Saints see and are amazed, and sing His praise. They contract – “He must increase, and I must decrease” (Jn. 3.30) – in order for divine love to circulate, to flow, to pour forth. For the earth to be watered. For the shadow to be illuminated. For the sorrow of the world to be comforted, to be turned to rejoicing.
They sought first the Kingdom of God, and everything else was given them as a free gift. They are not simply thinkers, orators, writers, poets. They are free people, true, real; they are united with God. They moved spontaneously. They expressed themselves honestly. They loved humility. They were filled with wisdom. They became golden-mouthed orators, theologians, poets, architects of the word. They developed hidden talents. Their being shone out of them. They did not learn things divine, they experienced them; they underwent them. These things changed them, deified them. They have become a revelation of God – in other words, a true revelation of man. They show what man is, and what he is able to become. […]
It is daring but also grand to give everything, and go beyond the bounds of corruption and commit yourself into the hands of the Mighty One. And in the end not to speak of yourself, but to have the grace of God speaking through you, in full awareness and contrition.
The Fathers, “the great elements who constitute the faith as it were a creation” (Great Vespers, Feast of the three Hierarchs), achieved all that.
~Archimandrite Vasileios, excerpt from “The Light of Christ Shines upon All” through All the Saints
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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.
"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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