St. John understands that we are out of our depths whenever we try to capture with words what comes through experience. This is true in particular of the heights of prayer, contemplation, and with dispassion. John’s language is poetic and thus a reflection of his straining to present us with the end of the spiritual life and what the heart longs for the most. In concluding his teachings on prayer, he warns us of certain pitfalls to avoid in order that our focus might remain upon Christ. Above al...
Oct 24, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 7Ep. 117
It’s important for us as we read the fathers and consider the discipline that they embraced regarding our appetites and desires that we do not demonize these realities or fall into extreme practices. At the heart of the fathers’ lives and teachings is desire; allowing the love of God and gratitude for his gifts to guide and direct their understanding of life and perception of reality. It is true that the desert was every bit the laboratory; the fathers often pushed themselves in extreme ways in ...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 6Ep. 162
As St. John draws us more deeply into his understanding of prayer and the experience of intimacy with God, he begins to emphasize the importance of maintaining purity of heart and humility. Either through negligence or through demonic provocation, we can find ourselves being driven not by the Holy Spirit toward God but rather driven by the desires of the flesh. The vulnerability of prayer, opening our minds and our hearts to God, also carries with it the need to have established watchfulness of ...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 116
It may seem surprising that the fathers spend so much time speaking about food and how we approach eating. Yet the needs of the flesh are very much a part of who we are as human beings. So how we eat and what we eat can affect what goes on internally. We can be subject to disorder or extremes in one fashion or another. What we see in the desert fathers and mothers is a love of fasting because they saw it as the insurer and foundation of the other virtues. In other words, when one can order an ap...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 161
Above all St. John’s writing on prayer works to break through the myopic vision that we have of life, of prayer, and of God. Like so many of the fathers, he will hammer away at anything which prevents us from experiencing the fullness of God’s love and mercy. Thus, he both rebukes and encourages. We began this evening with a warning about admitting fantasies into our mind and heart during prayer. The demonic provocation at such times will be to use religious ideas, visions, etc., to distract us ...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 115
We continued this evening to delve more deeply into the fathers’ understanding of the practice of fasting. Once again we see that they learned from experience that it is better to eat once a day but not to the point of satiation. One must be measured and restrained in the practice, so is not to become weak and incapable of work or of fulfilling one’s prayer rule. We also began to see that there was variance in the practices embraced by various monks, both in terms of their diet and the amount th...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 160
What is prayer and, more importantly, what do we become by engaging in prayer? So often we take a reductive view of the realities in our life, including the reality of our relationship with God. We reduce our converse with God to a discipline or an afterthought or worse and obligation. And yet as we read the fathers, we begin to see with greater clarity that prayer involves a kind of mutual vulnerability. We stand before the Other, God, withholding nothing of ourselves from him. In this, we imit...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr•Season 7Ep. 114
We continued our reading of the Evergetinos this evening with hypotheses 19 and 20. Once again we find ourselves considering the fathers’ teaching on eating and our use of food. Part of the reason they spend so much time on this subject is because they understand the meaning that food has for us as human beings and that it often goes well beyond that of nourishment. We come into this world and our first and earliest experience is that of being suckled; fed at the breast of our mother and thereby...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 159
The very words of St. John Climacus seem to carry us up to heights hitherto unknown and unexpected. The experience of this ascent takes place as we feel our hearts begin to burn for love of God and the desire for him in prayer. St. John quickly moves us away from looking at prayer as a mere discipline and rather our being drawn into the depths of Mystery, the very Mystery of the Triune God. The act of praying is a blessing in and of itself. To enter into this converse with God is also to experie...
Aug 29, 2024•57 min•Season 7Ep. 113
Synopsis of tonight’s group on the Evergetinos- Hypothesis 18 Sections H and I: This evening we concluded hypothesis 18 with the clarity that only St. John Cassian can bring. Cassian, though as western monk, spent many years in Egypt among the desert fathers and was able to distill their thought with great clarity for the western mind as well as the western monk. He shows us what the practice, or as he says, the vast experience of the monks over the course of time offers us. They show us that we...
Aug 27, 2024•59 min•Season 6Ep. 158
Joy! Suddenly, as we read through the Ladder of Dive Ascent every cross, every struggle in the spiritual life, while still present, begins to fade into the background. The costs involved in this struggle pales in comparison to the blessings and the fruits that God bestows upon us, especially prayer . St. John places before us the essentials of prayer - as well as what can undermine it. We continue to struggle to confine our thoughts and then to completely still the mind and the heart. When this ...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 7Ep. 112
No one is going to take up the practice of fasting or come to “love fasting” as we have often spoken of unless they are taught by those who have deep and long experience in the practice. As we have seen the desert was very much laboratory. Those who entered into it were driven by the desire for the Lord and to remove any impediment to that desire. Yet, we see in the writings of the Evergetinos a natural progression, an organic progression, in the practice. Their zeal for the Lord often led the m...
Aug 20, 2024•59 min•Season 6Ep. 157
There are some things that cannot be learned from books – prayer most of all! However, St. John, as so many of the Saints speaks to us from long experience as one who truly has seen Christ, knows Christ and has conversed with him deeply. Whatever might be lacking in his thought it still stokes the fire of desire within any heart that longs for God. The desert fathers understood that God looks upon us as his sons and daughters his children, and the simplest word or groan from the heart is suffici...
Aug 15, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 7Ep. 111
We picked up this evening with the beginning of hypothesis 18. For weeks now we have been reading about the essential practice of fasting. The cultivation of virtue and the overcoming of the passions is impossible without it. Making use of the body to strengthen the soul is a necessity. But we quickly realize from the stories that this practice can become imbalanced; monks could fall into extremes and be tempted to engage in disciplines in ways that feed the ego – ways that make them feel holy o...
Aug 13, 2024•57 min•Season 6Ep. 156
As St. John Climacus comes to the end of the step on stillness and segues into the step on prayer, it is as if he is beckoning us with every word to enter into silence and to give ourselves over to prayer; not as a discipline but rather as a response to the gift of God’s love. We are so often filled with a hunger that is inexplicable to us. We seek to nourish ourselves upon the things of this world indiscriminately - only to find them sadly insufficient. We pathetically move on to something else...
Aug 08, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 7Ep. 110
One of the most wonderful things that someone said in the group tonight was: “I am amazed at how simple it all is!” And they are absolutely right in their observation. All that the fathers tell us - about the struggle for purity of heart and overcoming the passions, seeking stillness and constancy in prayer - comes down to one simple reality. God is love and that all run but “one receives the prize without effort!” He who humbles himself will be exalted. The moment we turn the mind and the heart...
Aug 01, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 7Ep. 109
The desert was a laboratory. The monks went into its depths precisely to push the limits of what they needed in order to sustain themselves; whether it be food, water or sleep. Therefore, we must not find ourselves put off by the stories that seem so extreme. Quite simply, they were extreme! The desert being a laboratory, compelled the monks not only to evaluate their motives but also the restraint and measure that was necessary in order not to fall into extremes where they would hurt themselves...
Jul 30, 2024•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 155
St. John draws us into the experience of stillness and its many fruits. It is a precious gift that comes to us by the grace of God and takes root in a heart prepared through years of asceticism and watchfulness. It is our waiting upon God. In many ways this sums up the vocation of the hermit/monk. But it also captures the essence of our life and the life of prayer. We are ever waiting upon God to act in our life and we seek to cultivate in our hearts a receptivity to his will and grace. This is ...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 108
We picked up once again with the theme of “loving fasting.” The severity of the desert father’s practice of this discipline reveals that love. They discovered not only how essential the body is in the spiritual struggle to overcome attachment and the order of one’s desires towards God, but also that fasting brings a simplicity to one’s life. We begin to realize that we need much less than we imagine. We are often tempted to think that we need to pamper the body so as not to become sick or weak. ...
Jul 23, 2024•59 min•Season 6Ep. 154
We continued our discussion of the fathers’ love for abstinence and fasting. While their feats seem amazing to us as well as how little food they needed to sustain themselves, the importance is what this love of these disciplines show us. They were not embraced simply as forms of discipline or endurance, but rather that which humbled the mind and the body. It is counterintuitive for all of those who live in times of great abundance to imagine that radically limiting both the amount and type of f...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 153
The fathers often draw us along this mysterious path, the narrow path, that leads to the kingdom. They lead us, as it were, “where angels fear to tread.” They show us in an unvarnished fashion how the path to Godly love and virtue passes through affliction. Yet, even that is too simplistic. It is the suffering heart, the heart crushed by prayer and the desire for God, that gives birth to virtue. One cannot have God sorrow and suffering if he does not first cherish the causes of these. It is here...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 152
St. John Climacus once again gives us powerful images to help us understand the meaning of stillness and how it is to be protected. One such image is that of an eyelash that falls into the eye and creates irritation. The enemy of stillness is agitation; we are often driven to distraction by a concern for our physical and emotional well-being. Fear can create within us a kind of hypochondria. We become hypersensitive to our health and well-being. Unchecked, this fear can be become so excessive th...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 7Ep. 107
What is it that we are hungry for in this world? So many of the writings of the fathers can be reduced to this very question. What is the deepest desire of our hearts? What have we been created for and what satisfies the sense of incompleteness or the strange feeling of nostalgia within us? Because we have been created for God and find in Him our truest identity, we are going to experience ourselves as strangers in a strange world. We are made like everyone else and experience internal and exter...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 6Ep. 151
There is a beautiful movement created in the heart by St. John’s writing; it is almost a dance. We move back-and-forth with St. John by simultaneously reflecting upon the beauty of silence and stillness and the intimacy that we experience with God through it - while also being shown what the loss of the silence does to us. The silence of which St. John speaks is not just the absence of noise, but rather the presence of a love and life that transcends our understanding. It can only be experienced...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 7Ep. 106
Humility and affliction: Two words that often evoke within us intense fear and anxiety. We are formed by a kind of pathological self-love. The fathers understood our focus upon worldly things as a need to create a sense of security and identity. We desperately want to protect ourselves from hardship and from pain and so we surround ourselves as much as we can to distract ourselves from the reality of death or the presence of suffering in our lives and in the world. It is not only external realit...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 150
In pursuing life in Christ, the experience of reality is often turned on its head. Our perception of the world around us and the interior world is shaped and formed by so many forces and influences. In a counterintuitive fashion, we have to move in opposing directions to the things that satisfy our ego or the desires of the flesh. Needless to say this can be disconcerting. We may see ourselves as understanding the faith or as having grown in certain virtues only to have it dispersed in an instan...
Jun 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 7Ep. 105
Only the most stalwart and patient of souls can follow along with this evening’s readings without being troubled. Once again it is repeated for us that our life is to be one of constant repentance; that is, turning toward God. Systematically the fathers break down every illusion that we might have about ourselves as having no need of such repentance. Even if we fulfill the work of the day, our response must be like the servants in the gospel: “we are unworthy and have only fulfilled what is our ...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 149
What possibly could hesychasm or the life of hesychasts - those who live in perpetual stillness and prayer - mean for those who living in the world; for all of those surrounded by a constant stream of noise and distraction?The answer is everything! Though few are called to this manner of life, all are destined to experience the fullness of its joy and sweetness in Christ in the kingdom. We have been made sons and daughters of God and the very Spirit of Love dwells within our hearts. What moves u...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 104
We picked up this evening with Hypothesis 13 on the subject of keeping Vigil and not giving oneself over to excessive sleep. However, as we immersed ourselves in the reading, we began to see the father guiding us into something much deeper. The teaching on keeping vigil is a bridge to talking about Repentance. We were presented with the most beautiful understanding of the path the Christ guide us upon. There is a radical simplicity about it that is meant to cut through our tendency to turn the f...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 6Ep. 148
It’s hard to imagine ourselves as being nourished upon stillness and silence. Yet, this is exactly what the fathers and St. John Climacus seek to teach us. Stillness allows us to have an experiential knowledge of intimacy with God - an encounter with Mystery. When we have shut the door to the senses, when we stilled our mouth from constant chatter and when we have shut the gate of the heart to demonic powers, it is then that we become prayer and gaze upon the Lord face-to-face. Our petitions, ou...
Jun 06, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 103
