“An arrogant man yearns for authority; he cannot, or rather, does not wish to perish utterly.“ In many ways, this one saying sums up our reflection this evening. When pride takes hold of an individual soul, one begins to move further and further away from God. Rather than “perish utterly” - that is, die to self and sin - one drives God from the mind and heart. The capacity to love diminishes, the desire to humiliate others increases, and, finally, our perception of reality is distorted beyond me...
Sep 28, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 7Ep. 72
How beautiful is the path that the Lord sets before us to draw us to Himself. Its beauty is rooted in the fact that it is the path that He took toward us. God reveals himself, He draws back to the veil, and shows us the depth of his humility, love and compassion. What we find in the desert fathers and in their sayings is a portrait of the gospels; more specifically a portrait of Christ himself - the humble crucified One. We should never fear humility but rather gravitate towards it. It is someth...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 6Ep. 119
Rarely do we acknowledge the extraordinary gift that God gave to his Church in the Desert fathers. It is precisely through their “living martyrdom” - their dying to self, to sin, and to the world, that they are able to guide us through the trials and tribulations of spiritual warfare. Their perception of our vulnerabilities as human beings was very acute. Humbled over and over again and acknowledging their sin and poverty before God, they came to see the many ways that the vices manifest themsel...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 7Ep. 71
Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on The Evergetinos: We often hear the question: “How would you describe the taste of honey to another who has never had it or the taste of a pear or its texture?” We might ask the very same questions about the virtues and in particular that of humility. How do we describe something that another has never tasted or that we have barely tasted ourselves? More importantly, how do we describe something that expresses not natural virtue, but the virtue of Christ himself - t...
Sep 19, 2023•59 min•Season 6Ep. 118
One of the prophets writes: “the human heart is a treacherous thing, who can endure it!“ We begin to see the truth of this statement or more accurately the truth that is behind it. The spiritual battle that we engage in with our passions and our thoughts is often dogged by a kind of diabolical intrigue. The devil is relentless and unresting. He can manipulate us in such a way that he makes us desire to put ourselves forward, to put ourselves into the light; convincing us that to do so will draw ...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 7Ep. 70
Humility is above all the other virtues.” Living in the truth allows for the most important thing to emerge in a person’s life – repentance. When we see and acknowledge the nature of our actions and our thoughts and we bring them before God, it is then that He can heal us and make us whole. The struggle to do this, however, can be great. There’s always part of us that wants to hold on to the illusion of creating our own dignity and identity. Humility compels us to acknowledge that all things beg...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 117
Humility often eludes us not only in practice but in our ability to understand it. As always, we have to look to Christ as the standard. What we see revealed in him through the incarnation and in the Paschal mystery opens the door for us to begin to walk this same path. Understanding comes through experience. We must be shown what humility is and be made humble through experience. So often the self seeks to place itself at the center of existence; and in our spiritual life we begin to lose sight...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 116
With stunning clarity, St. John Climacus begins to show us the subtlety of vainglory; how easily it draws us to focus upon the self in one fashion or another. It suggests thoughts that elevate us in our own eyes and diminishes others in our judgment. Through vainglory we begin the movement of placing ourselves in the position of God; placing the self at the center of the spiritual life. The battle becomes ever so fierce and dangerous because at this point the focus of the demons’ attention is on...
Aug 31, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 7Ep. 69
Every generation, every person, must be made humble! Whatever way that takes place - whatever means we are shown this, it must happen if we are to follow Christ, and if we are to live in Him. He is Humility because he is Truth. In fact, the simplest definition of humility for us is truthful living. We must live in the Truth that has been revealed to us - we must live in Christ. That sounds a lot easier than what it is. Our egos often snap back into the center. The self, even within the context o...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 115
Self-esteem . . . how the meaning of that has changed over the generations. And when it becomes abstracted from our relationship with God, when our self-identity, purpose, and meaning becomes unmoored from He who created us, self-esteem can become the most grotesque of the vices. It will not only diminish our virtues, but destroy them completely. When the sweat and the toil of the spiritual life is turned back on the self or when ascetical practices become ends in themselves, they lose all value...
Aug 24, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 7Ep. 68
I can say this without any caveat - reading the Evergetinos is one of the most important things that we could do for ourselves in the spiritual life. I know that might sound extreme; especially given all of the writings of the Fathers that we have read over the course of the years, including the writings of the Philokalia. Yet, there’s something exceptional about the Evergetinos. We are not only given specific teachings but we are shown the lived experience of the fathers; how they came to under...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 6Ep. 114
Anxiety, it has been said, is ubiquitous. We all experience it and in its many manifestations. On a purely psychological level, one can never get to the heart or source of this feeling and its accompanying isolation. Often we find ourselves desperate to free ourselves from its grip. Therefore, we either immerse ourselves in the things of this world and maintain the illusion of security or we become paralyzed by it completely. The desert fathers including St. John Climacus, however, remind us tha...
Aug 17, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Season 7Ep. 67
One of the most difficult things about the faith is not simply desiring God with all of our heart, but allowing God and His desire for us to transform us and shape us. It means allowing Him to draw us into His own life and virtue. We are to become in the world what He is to us. Therefore, we are immediately confronted with the fact that we have to let go of the limited powers of our own reason and judgment. We must place our faith and hope in the providence of God to guide us along the path that...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 6Ep. 113
All that was to be redeemed had also then to be assumed in the Incarnation. All that is human and all that is part of the human experience must be embraced by Christ in order that it might be healed by his grace. We are shown this in a very simple way in regards to one of our basic appetites as human beings - sleep. Like any other appetite, it must be ordered rightly; otherwise, it can end up stealing half of our life. Rather than being drawn into the rest of contemplation, we are often pulled i...
Aug 10, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 7Ep. 66
Being thrown off balance! The experience of vertigo! This is what comes to mind when considering the writings from the Evergetinos this evening. Once again, the gospel is put before us in an unvarnished fashion. It is as if through the unclouded vision of the fathers suddenly the truth of the gospel appears before us and all of its starkness. We are to love and to become love. It is this reality that must shape and form our interaction with every person we encounter. It suggests a kind of vulner...
Aug 08, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 112
The healing of the soul! So often we lose sight of the meaning of the spiritual life and the disciplines that we embrace. We often look at them as being punitive or requiring us to give up something that we enjoy or take pleasure in. We can lose sight very quickly of the presence of God even in the practice of prayer. This came forward when we discussed this evening something such as vigils. Rarely is the practice of vigil (breaking one’s sleep to rise and pray at night) ever discussed as a valu...
Aug 03, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Season 7Ep. 65
If I were to give a title to this evening’s session, it would be “What is the place of the Christian in a post-Christian culture? Even better, “What is the place of the Christian in an age of nihilism? When we begin to consider our conduct in relationship to others, how we are to conform ourselves not simply to a law or teaching but to Christ himself, we are confronted with something quite radical. We are to meet insults, hatred, misunderstandings and aggression with humility. Love is always mea...
Aug 01, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 6Ep. 111
When we think of appetites or bodily desires, we rarely consider something such as sleep. Yet this evening St. John shows us that sleep is something that can disrupt that which is most important for the spiritual life; our prayer. Sleep is certainly an essential need that we have as human beings. However, there are many reasons that we can be drawn into it excessively. One of these is human nature of course. However, sleep can come upon us from an excess of food, from the temptation of demons, a...
Jul 27, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 7Ep. 64
“In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.” W.H. Auden (1907-1973) “The road of cleansing goes through that desert. It shall be named the way of holiness.” Isaiah 35.8 (LXX) It has been said that all true renewal within the life of the church comes through the desert fathers, or rather through the embrace of their wisdom. For it is not a worldly wisdom but the wisdom of the gospel, the wisdom of the kingdom that they set before us; not in an abstract fashion but through lived e...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 6Ep. 110
Darkness, whatever its source, cannot be driven out or overcome by mere force of will or through reason. The fathers reveal to us a darkness that exists within the human heart like no other - insensibility. It is a deadening of the soul and the death of the mind before the death of the body. We all have our vulnerabilities and have experienced wounds on both spiritual and emotional levels. To address this darkness requires an even greater trust in the grace of God to guide us through it and to p...
Jul 20, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 63
The conclusion of hypothesis 41 was as beautiful as it was convicting. The fathers speak of a stability of mind and heart that deepens through the ascetic life and allows us to see the most subtle movements either toward or away from God. This subtlety of perception is unmatched in the spiritual tradition. The ascetic life revealed to the fathers not only sin and its manifestations, but the power of God’s grace to transform our lives in such a way that every impediment is removed that prevents u...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 6Ep. 109
Freedom! We often associate this word with our own rights in this world or our capacity to do as we will and go where we want. A kind of promise is put out to us - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet the image of freedom that is put before us by the saints and by Saint John in particular is attached to our willingness to be “detached” from the things of the world. God created all things good but in our sin our tendency is to idolize them. We seek our identity and happiness in the th...
Jul 13, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 7Ep. 62
The Mystery of the Human Person! What comes forward in the ascetical writings of the fathers is not a moralistic or legalistic view of sin. Rather, we see within them a deep understanding of the complex beauty and dignity of the human person despite often being marred by sin. Perhaps too often we emphasize the negative; rather than fostering a desire both for God and for virtue and for the freedom and joy that it brings to the human heart. Like so many of the fathers, Saint John describes certai...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 61
Avoidance: often this can be the fundamental reason that an individual gravitates towards solitude, religious, or otherwise. We do not want to be in the presence of others, because it is there that we stand revealed - not only in their eyes, but in our own. In our interactions with others, we begin to see our dominant passions and the poverty of our sin. Our weak spots, blind spots and hard spots become perfectly evident to us. It is for this reason that the desert fathers counsel spending many ...
Jul 04, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 6Ep. 108
The fathers have often been accused of having a negative anthropology; that is, a negative view of the human person and human nature. However, as we read through St. John’s teachings on chastity and purity, we begin to see that their understanding arises from a very high and exalted anthropology. Their understanding of how God has made us, the beauty that is expressed in our very nature is so high that we must respect its preciousness as a gift from God. Furthermore we must also respect the powe...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 7Ep. 60
In the advertisement for and description of this evening’s group, I wrote: “How does one deal with feelings of desolation in regards to one’s vocation, resentment towards others, being treated with envy or finding one’s circumstances to be a source of temptation? In the face of the many trials brought upon us by the evil one, great perseverance is needed and freedom from self will.” This description, however, does not capture the depth of the wisdom that we were exposed to this evening. All of o...
Jun 27, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 6Ep. 107
Gustave Flaubert once wrote, “God is in the details.“ The truth of this statement is born out in this evening‘s writing from Saint John Climacus on the fathers’ understanding and description of the development of a passion within the soul. With great clarity, St. John takes us step-by-step through the inner movements of the mind and the heart. The battle begins with an assault. An image or an idea is encountered for the first time and enters into the heart. There’s no sin in this, but our respon...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 59
The beauty of virtue! So often we discuss the spiritual life as if the main goal or the end of it is simply the avoidance of sin. While avoiding sin certainly is essential, we are called to something far greater. What we received through the Paschal mystery and through our baptism is adoption as sons and daughters of God; the capacity by grace to share in the life of the Trinity. The fathers speak of deification. As we read through Saint John’s description of purity and chastity, these truths be...
Jun 15, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 7Ep. 58
Stability of mind and heart: such are the characteristics of those who live the ascetic life. The mystery of the human person is such that we must suspend judgment of others as well as judgment of ourselves. On a psychological level, things are multi- determined. In other words, many things coalesce to form our thoughts and actions. Therefore, we must be very cautious in the spiritual life not to act quickly when tempted to leave our state of life or vocation. The change of mere externals does n...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 106
As we continue our reading of Step 15 on purity and chastity, gradually we are being shown a broader vision of what is offered to us through the ascetical life. Purity and chastity are not limited to dealing with our sexual appetites. Rather, we are striving to overcome any impediment to our seeing things and loving things in the manner in which God created us. Our vision is often distorted by our sin to the extent that we will objectify the things of this world and individuals to be used in wha...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Season 7Ep. 57
