Thank you to everyone who participated tonight in a very challenging reading and discussion of The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Synopsis: Tonight we began Step Five on painstaking repentance and an account of the Prison, another monastic community for those who have broken their vows and embraced a life of deep penance. This is probably the most difficult part of The Ladder to read. It requires the most work from us as readers to think about what John is doing. Why does he present us with such an im...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 7Ep. 29
We began hypothesis 28 this evening. I have to say that it is one of the clearest and most straightforward explanations and discussion of the ascetical life. What comes forward through the fathers’ teaching is not only the necessity of asceticism, of striving for God and for the life of virtue, but also the beauty that one begins to see and the sweetness of the life of virtue that one begins to taste. The ascetic life is indeed filled with toil and sweat. However, it is not simply a test of endu...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 81
We are called to be conformed to Christ. How easy it is to say such a thing. Yet, so often, our understanding of faith, obedience, humility, and charity is defined within the narrow limits of human reason and understanding. We grow very uncomfortable with what is undefined or what lacks boundaries. Allowing our souls to be stretched by faith, to be drawn along by wonder and led by the Spirit can feel terrifyingly vulnerable. The ego is most often the center of our existence. To let go of the fal...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 7Ep. 28
Great group tonight folks and wonderful comments! Synopsis: The gentleness of God, the subtle workings of the Holy Spirit, the influence of the angels in our lives and the importance of gratitude - all of these things come forward in hypothesis 27 to strengthen us in the spiritual battle and to illuminate the path ahead. Life so often weighs us down. We feel the burden of ourselves most keenly and we can become jaded in the way that we view life, the world and God. Despite God making Himself a s...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 6Ep. 80
The unvarnished truth is not easy to hear or see. This is especially true when it reveals that which is within our own heart or what is lacking in our love or our faith. Saint John Climacus gives us many stories from the lives of monks who live obedience to the point where it surpasses reason and right judgment; or when it seems to reach the point of absurdity. And indeed this is how the world sees Christianity and in its truest form; as foolishness and a stumbling block. In so many ways we have...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 27
Scrutinizing the movements of the mind and the heart is never an easy thing to do. In fact we find ever more clever ways to avoid doing so. Truthful living, a willingness to acknowledge one’s failings and communicate them to a spiritual guide is put before for us by the fathers as a path that we should desire. It is not meant to punish us or to humiliate us, but rather to free us in our capacity to love God and to give ourselves to Him. We see in this hypothesis how deep this kind of observation...
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 6Ep. 79
“Put out into the deep.”As we picked up with the Saint John’s writing on the spirit and practice of obedience the path set before us becomes ever so clear. We are called to be conformed to Christ. He is the standard by which we measure our lives and see what we have become in and through Him. We are to love obedience not because it brings satisfaction and joy in this world or because the things that happen to us or are asked of us conform to reason or our natural sensibilities. The fruit of obed...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 26
It is as if we are sitting at the well, drinking deeply of that life-giving water. The fathers’ writings on the spiritual life speak to the soul in such a deep fashion that it gives rise to an insatiable desire for God. It is the willingness to do exactly what the fathers instruct in this hypothesis in our own way that will bear fruit. They call those entering the monastic life to look deeply into their hearts to see if they have there a desire for God; a desire strong enough to carry them to th...
Sep 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 78
One participant in this evening‘s group commented that the counsel that St. John gives is eminently practical. This is true of the writings of the fathers as a whole. Their wisdom is rooted in Praxis; the practice of the faith, the exercise of the faith. Their writings seem to make so much sense because they are rooted in experiences that we so often take for granted or fail to explore. What is our motivation for doing or not doing certain things? What is it that drives us or leads us to neglige...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 7Ep. 25
We began by considering how the fathers of the desert would scrutinize individuals who would come to the monastery seeking entrance. They would put men to the test in every way to see if they had both the psychological and spiritual maturity not simply to make a decision but to persevere in the life and trials of a monk. One does not enter a monastery in a state of perfection. One is perfected through trials and tribulations; through the cross that is particular to one’s life. What stands out in...
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 77
What emerges in reading the fathers is the subtle and yet intense interior battle that takes place within the human heart. We are often men and women of great contradiction. We can love and hate the same thing at the same time. We can create unholy alliances with others whose passions speak to our own and nurture our own. "Like speaks to like." And so we are taught that we should seek the company of those who love and desire God. Even if our experience in this world is one of isolation, if we fe...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 76
I’ve often thought the Desert Fathers were the first and truest of depth psychologists. Their understanding of the human person, the workings of the mind and the heart, the effects of the emotions, and the workings of the unconscious is unparalleled in anything that we have seen before or sense. Tonight Saint John Climacus, in a few paragraphs, takes us into those depths. He shows us the extent to which we can become conceited and that a false self can begin to emerge and become solidified. Out ...
Sep 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 24
VWhere do we live our lives? Who is God and how do we see ourselves and our own identity in light of the Incarnation? The writings of the Fathers have at their center these basic questions. So often our tendency is to dissect the faith. We pull things apart - thinking that we are going to understand them with a greater clarity. Yet in doing so we lose sight of the whole. Can we understand Mystery of God or the other unless we allow ourselves to be drawn into it and what is beyond us. We lose sig...
Sep 06, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 75
As we allow ourselves to be drawn deeper into the meaning of obedience by St. John’s writing, we begin to see the beauty of the virtue itself and the fruit that it produces within the soul. It is not a slavishness or weakness of will, but rather a soul that has been awakened to the lack of freedom that comes from self-judgment and that is limited or obscured by sin. The more that the heart is purified by grace and the ascetic life, the more we begin to long for obedience because it is an imitati...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 7Ep. 23
There is no life without wonder. The life that is given to us in Christ is not something that emerges from our own imagination or judgment; rather it is revealed to us in the cross, in the gospel, and especially in the holy Eucharist. We are drawn into something that is greater than ourselves and on a natural level this cannot be anything but terrifying. The desert fathers present us with the gospel in an unvarnished fashion. Over and over again we are shown how we are to prefer God and seek God...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 6Ep. 74
Tonight we continued with our study of Step 4 on Obedience. As we go deeper into St. John’s writing we begin to see the fruit of this virtue that often remains hidden to our eyes. Our obedience fosters habit; in particular the habit of virtue where one acknowledges that God is a fellow laborer. Obedience also shapes the way that we approach the confession of our sins. It allows us to see their gravity, and it fosters within us the deepest sense of compunction. The fruit of this, however, is a re...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 7Ep. 22
A tremendous reflection this evening on the writings of the fathers regarding entanglements with the things of this world. The Evil One acts with great subtlety and the further one progresses in the spiritual life the more subtle these temptations become. Often things can be put before us that seem to be good and holy and worthy of our attention; yet do we respond to them or do we step back and discern whether or not they are from God or the Evil One? The greatest of temptations can appeal to ou...
Aug 23, 2022•57 min•Season 6Ep. 73
Tonight we continued our reading of Step 4 on Obedience and its practice in the spiritual life. Saint John, as well as so many of the desert fathers, unearth what we typically keep hidden within our hearts. Rather than living in a spirit of obedience and allowing that obedience to bear the fruit of humility within us by setting aside our own willfulness, we cling to the illusions of self-sufficiency. Despite all that Christ has done and despite all that God has given to us, we believe that we ca...
Aug 21, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 7Ep. 21
We continued our reading of Step 4 from the Ladder of Divine Ascent on Obedience and the spirit with which it is practiced. What one begins to see in the writings of the Fathers is that obedience is not slavishness that destroys the personality or the will of the other. It arises out of a relationship; first and foremost the relationship between the Father and the Son that brought about our salvation; wherein Christ through the Spirit of love became obedient even unto death on the cross. Obedien...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 20
We continued to listen to the Father‘s counsel on avoiding relationships or circumstances that can bring us spiritual harm. Such thought is not guided by a lack of love or charity or hospitality; rather it is rooted in an understanding that we are first to love the Lord our God with all of our mind, soul, heart, and strength. It is only having our love ordered and directed toward Him that our love of the things and and people within the world can be rightly ordered. We were given one example aft...
Aug 09, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 72
Reading the Fathers takes us to the very heart of the gospel and in doing so they pull us out of our comfort zone. Obedience is the true path to freedom. But freedom comes at a cost and perfect freedom comes through self-sacrificing love. It is cruciform. All that we were presented with this evening made it very clear that our life is to be a deep immersion in the Paschal Mystery; that is, a profound dying and rising. We are dying to self and sin and rising to new life in Christ. This is the pat...
Aug 04, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 7Ep. 19
Reading the Fathers often pierces the heart and changes our perspective upon life and our perception of reality itself. We continued with our reading of the fathers’ exhortation not to engage those who can bring harm to us in the spiritual life. This is often troublesome to modern sensibilities. The call to evangelize draws us out to engage the world. But what are we to give if we simply allow ourselves to be drawn back into the slavery of sin? We have to radically abandon our lives to Christ, c...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 71
Such a beautiful image is presented to us of the life obedience in a few paragraphs. St. John finds himself wrapped in conversation with one of the elderly fathers. He is asked if he has embraced the life that God has made possible for him. The Holy Spirit has descended upon him with the dew of purity, not unlike that of the blessed Virgin Mary, and the Most High has overshadowed him with patience, the very patience of Christ. This is the grace that has been given to us all. Thus St. John is ask...
Jul 28, 2022•58 min•Season 7Ep. 18
We continued along the central theme of Hypothesis 22 and those that follow - we are to avoid entering into the things of the world and so lose what is most life-giving. The monk becomes a very powerful example of this danger because in his response to God’s call he leaves everything within the world in order to be wholly given over to God; to trust fully in God’s providence, to pray without ceasing and to embrace a life of modification. It is to embrace the angelic life. In contrast to fallen a...
Jul 26, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 6Ep. 70
We continued our discussion of Step 4 on Obedience. As deeply challenging as St John’s teachings are and as jarring as the examples of monks being tested can be, a light begins to shine through to the dark places of our minds that resist allowing ourselves to be conformed to the obedience of Christ. Obedience as well as Love is cruciform. It involves a dying to self, self-will, and vanity in order that true meekness, love, and freedom might emerge. The trials that the monks endured were not some...
Jul 21, 2022•1 hr•Season 7Ep. 17
Both an inspiring and challenging section from the Evergetinos this evening! The Fathers speak to us about the monastic life and its clear focus; a clarity that perhaps we have lost in more recent times. The monk lives for God, to seek God, to listen to God, and to pray. This he does as part of the Body of Christ, the Church, for the salvation of others. And yet we are shown how easy it is to cast off that “sweet yoke” of the Lord where He no longer has authority over us. Even a monk would gravi...
Jul 19, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 6Ep. 69
Tonight we continued with St. John’s Step on Obedience. We are presented with an image that may be unfamiliar to us. Obedience is not presented as something that is crushing to the human spirit. It can be humiliating - in the sense that it seems to drive out from the soul and the heart all vestige of arrogance, fierceness, and hostility towards others. Yet, what emerges from this exercise of faith is conformity to Christ. When it is rooted in a true love for one’s shepherd, one’s Elder, then a k...
Jul 14, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 7Ep. 16
We picked up this evening with our reading of the very challenging Hypothesis 22: the Fathers’ teaching to avoid the world and worldly relations. However, we must understand that when they speak of the world they speak of those things or relationships that are driven more by the passions than by grace and the love of God. Central to this is having a rightly ordered love that is focused upon Christ. All things must begin and end with Him and all things are judged in light of the Love of the Kingd...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 6Ep. 68
We picked up this evening once again with Step 4 on Obedience. John describes it for us as standing before God with a kind of simplicity and humility; truthful living before God and others. When we live in this manner we unburden ourselves and so run a good race without a heavy conscience and also protected from the cunning of the demons who make exacting investigation of our deeds. After describing obedience and defining it, John then turns to give us beautiful examples of those who lived it in...
Jul 07, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 7Ep. 15
We began this evening with the final pages of Hypothesis 21 describing the importance of not opening one’s conscience to an individual unless guided by the Grace of God to do so. It is not a small thing to entrust oneself to the care of another, especially the care of one’s soul. Therefore we are counseled to be discriminating. For the elder that we choose, or rather the elder that God chooses for us, is a gift; a relationship of love and devotion. An Elder does not see himself as detached from ...
Jul 05, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 6Ep. 67
