Hesychasm: A Practical Spirituality for Everyone

 

You are your own spirituality. What you do, what you say, how you work, and everything about you is where you can find God. Nowhere else! Well, we might say in response to this: "Where is God?". I don’t see God, I don’t feel God, and I certainly don’t believe that I am spiritual. However, I do feel spiritual when I go to a certain place or do certain things that are considered spiritual, like listening to spiritual music or listening to spiritual teachings. Well, think about that for a moment. We just said that doing this or going to this place makes us feel spiritual. If we were blind or deaf, would going to a spiritual place or listening to spiritual music or teaching make us feel spiritual? We might say, when we realize what they are yes. If this is so, then we need to ask ourselves: where does the origin of our spiritual experience come from, is it in the place or object, or does it come from within ourselves and if it really is from ourselves can we have it all the time? The answer that St. Isacc the Syrian gave, which you can find in the Philokalia, was the following. He said, "Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, and so you will see the things that are in heaven; for there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within your soul." For the Saint, we are the source of our spiritual experience. That is how God designed us. We just need to learn to find what already belongs to us and stop trying to find it in other places or things.

 

I mentioned that St. Isaac the Syrians teaching was in the Philokalia. The Philokalia are a collection of teachings that promote a spirituality, called Hesychasm, that can help us become the spiritual people that God has called us to be. These were originally put together for monastic communities but in them, you will find spiritual teachings that can help everyone. I know this personally because they have helped me. I am not a monk. I have a busy life, I am married with 8 children, 2 of my children have disabilities that need my constant attention, and also a member of the clergy. I have many obligations to my family and my parish and I have very little time to myself. Like most people, I am stretched thin. Nevertheless, through the spirituality of Hesychasm, I have found things helpful in encountering God in my everyday. Things that I will now be sharing in this video.

 

In that, I want to make it known that I am by no means an expert on this spirituality. I consider myself just a promoter. In that, I am only going to be promoting the things that are to be simple and beneficial. Things that are practical, that’s is why the title of this is a practical spirituality. In that I want to begin with what Saint Hesychios the Priest said, he said to “see Hesychia in all things”. This word means stillness. That’s what hesychasm means, it means the pursuit of silliness. Think of that word stillness, Hesychia, as what you read in Psalm 46:10 be still and know that I am God. Hesychia is not just being still it is entering that meeting point between you and God and this meeting point is found in 2 places in our mind and our body. Going back to the beginning question that I had about finding a spiritual experience in going to a place or in listening to something. We made the thing or place the spiritual experience by how we used our mind or body. These things by themselves can not do that. We made it that may. Take for instance, an icon people come into my church all the time and get spiritual feelings from seeing this sacred art. If they were blind this could not be so. The image awakened something in the eyes, in the body, in our mind. It pointed the way. This event became Hesychia, that stillness, that meeting point for us and God and what St. Hesychios the priest says to us is that we don’t need an icon for that we can have that doing the dishes, driving a car, eating dinner, and even spending time with people that otherwise not want to be around.

 

What I will be sharing now is how to find Hesychia in our body and minds and I'm going to start with the body. St. Symeon the New Theologian: "The mind is the eye of the soul, but the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit." That’s what the apostle Paul said in the scriptures. Many people just read that figuratively but Paul meant what he said. If you were to raise up your hand to the apostle and ask if God was in here, he would say yes God is in there and if he is in there you can use your hands to experience God. You will find in the fathers in the Philokalia a harmony that is needed with our body and mind in order to experience God in our everyday. We are not used to thinking like that. To us are hand is our hand but for St. Symeon and Paul, the hand becomes gods hand. We struggle with that idea because there is not much spirituality out there that includes the body in the equation. Many of us are familiar with fasting with the body but often we are not taught how fasting works. We are told to do. We are told that it’s a sacrifice or offering ourselves to God and these are all true things. In essence, Fasting is seeking to experience God with the body, and many people who have fasted, and prayer can tell you that there was something that was not there before. There was awareness of God in the body. This is a natural phenomenon because your body is made for God. God is ultimately going to resurrect our body, it was made for God but we don’t have to wait until the resurrection to encounter God now in the body. Now the reason that we often don’t experience god with the body is because we are letting the body run the show.

 

As many of us know too well we are born into the fallen world, and we develop things that the fathers called the passions. These things affect our body and mind and they keep us on a quest for how we should be fulfilled and one of the biggest passions can be found in our stomach. Most of the time we let our stomach determine how we will be happy and if we are not following our stomachs our stomach will punish us. You can see in this that harmony that I mentioned that fathers spoke about. The stomach leads our mind, and our mind leads our very soul to find that bag of chips and we won’t be happy until we have it. Now it’s not wrong to eat a bag of chips or to be hungry. It’s wrong to make the chips our quest. A proper pursuit of finding that bag of chips is to make that bag of chips an encounter with God. To find Hesychia in body. The fathers would say make getting to that bag of chips and eating them a prayer. You can eat and fast at the same time. You can do this by not letting your stomach dictate to you how you will eat. The stomach wants to gulf it down until your stuffed. Instead of doing that eat slowly and think of god feeding you with every bite. After all, God's original plan for eating was for spiritual encounter. It wasn’t just to survive. It was to receive our survival, our substance from the hand of God. That’s what food needs to be in this world. Food needs to be Hesychia, a meeting point with God. Our stomach can be filled with the experience of God. That’s what it was made for. That’s what our bodies were made for.

 

In that, you will find in the fathers of hesychasm many prescriptions on how to deal with the passions of the body and in all of them it's learning to use our bodies to experience God in what you are doing.  I mentioned in the begging working with your hands doing the dishes can be a spiritual experience, if you learn to make those dishes your meeting point with God. With all work we want to get it done as fast as we can, it might be difficult, but the main reason why is that we are not getting anything out of it and this is going to be my segway point to Hesychia of the mind because the number one thing that we do in our work is to use our minds to get us out of it. We daydream, we use our mind to get us out of it and our mind tells us that we won’t be happy until we get home and we are on that Sophia eating that bag of chips. Daydreaming claims to be our best friend at these times but it really is our greatest enemy. We should know this from driving. One of the biggest causes of auto accidents is daydreaming. You are not keeping your eyes on the road when you do it and bad things happen. This is the same thing with finding God in what you are doing.

 

You will find if you sit down in a quiet place to pray for a similar thing happening in your mind that happens when you work. Your mind doesn’t want to be there. You are not getting anything out of just sitting there!  So instead of that bag of chips and sofa, the daydream is about Jesus and the saints and all of a sudden you are one of the apostles and now you are going on a mission trip or you are doing this and that. The daydream makes you feel like a spiritual person but just as daydream is in your work it's keeping you from encountering God in what you are doing.

 

Hesychia of the mind is making your mind the meeting place for God. You can’t have that if your mind is in another place, even if it’s a good place. St. Evagrios the Solitary said that we need to learn to make our intellect deaf and dumb so we can pray, so we can really encounter God in the mind. That might sound strange. How can I shut my mind off? He is not saying to shut it off but rather to use it properly. The mind is out of control and its always going after things. It’s always trying to find something, always trying to lead us. We think this is normal but it’s not. Jesus tries to address this in something simple like how we start to worry about something. We let our minds take us long trips of worrying that sometimes last lifetimes. We think it's normal to do so but Jesus said we are like people who don’t believe. Someone who believes has taken control of their mind and has oriented their mind to finding God in what they’re doing.

 

This is a difficult thing to do but its something we must practice. We need to retrain the mind. The mind was designed for God but we have made it into something else. So now we need to bring it back to what it was made for and the fathers have a word for this called Nepsis which means Watchfulness. We need to learn to watch what goes into our mind and learn to condition our response to that and the conditioning comes from the repetition of turning the mind back to the memory of God through the use of the Jesus prayer. They want us to replace our daydreams with a continual invocation of the name of Jesus. Not focusing on any images of Jesus, just saying the words themselves, letting words retrain your mind to focus on God. This is a work that  is ongoing but you will find as you practice this that you won’t have always do the reptation. There will be times when your mind will be doing what it was made for. St. Seraphim of Sarov said there will be times when we don’t need to do the work of repetition because we will be filled with the joy of the lord. There will be times when you are doing those dishes that I mentioned with God.

 

Now I want to conclude with some practical things that we can start to do throughout your day that will be helpful. Many of the fathers talked about how breathing is the natural means by which we receive the holy spirit. That was God's original plan for air and breathing. Just as I mentioned earlier food was a way for us to receive God. One father said to learn to breathe in God and this is where I find a very simple way of praying throughout the day a way to be watchful by focusing on our breath. To fast and breathe at the same time. A way to make our body and mind work together in seeking God by how we breathe. As you  take in air, as an act of faith believe it’s the holy spirit, know that that air comes from God and as you take in that air invoke the name of God with your mind. This can be done in various ways with how you breathe. Find a way that works for you and when you do get to that point in your day when you get to be alone with God make it more intense. Use your body to pray. Don’t lie down sit up, develop a posture with your body that makes it attentive to God being in it. Learn to use your mind and body together in prayer. Seek that Hesychia of mind and body and become the temple of God that you were made to be.

 

The All Holy

 Extended commentary and homily here: (youtube link)

A homily for the Feast of the Maternity of Holy Anna

Today is the Feast of the maternity of Holy Anna. It’s through her that the Panagia was conceived. Pangia is one of the titles that our Byzantine tradition uses for Mary, it means the all-holy. She is all-holy not because she went on to become the Theotokos, the Birthgiver of God, but because that’s what she was by nature. She in fact represents a history of God working with human nature in crafting it to be what it was designed for, which was a temple of God. This is why we call it the feast of the maternity of Holy Anna because it was through Holy Anna and her ancestors that Mary became what we were meant to be.

As I said, our Lady became what we were meant to be. We might not be used to thinking in this way, but our bodies were created for eternity. God's plan for human nature was for it to become divine and his plan for this world that we live in was for it to become heaven. As we know, our ancestors frustrated this plan by their sin. However, God never changed his mind for us and the rest of the world, and you will find in the scriptures a whole history of getting us back on track. A track that begins with a people and a part of the earth that he chose to become holy, a people and part of the earth that he purified, a purification that found its fulfillment in Holy Anna when she conceived.

Going back to that plan that I mentioned in scripture for human nature. This was a plan for all of us. God may have worked through certain individuals and certain places, but he did so that we can all become what we were created for. In fact, you will find that the scriptures even speak to us of our conclusion. In the book of Revelation, it says that God will be bringing us back here. We are going to be resurrected and this earth that we live in will become heaven. It will be the permanent dwelling place of God and if that is the case we need to ask ourselves: how should we be living now? How should we be living in a body that will one day be immortal and how shall we be living upon an earth that will one day become heaven?

The apostles teach us in the scriptures that before the great day of the resurrection there will be a great purification. Everything they say will be purified by a divine fire. This fire is not meant to destroy us or the earth. God is not starting over from scratch. The scriptures speak of this in terms of how a blacksmith purifies his precious metal in the fire in order to remove the impurity.  This is important for us to understand because we need to learn to make ourselves and the world that we live in precious metal. We need to learn to be our own blacksmiths. God is going to finish what we started but it is his desire that we have something for him to finish.

In the work that he is asking from us, this work that he will finish, he is asking from us only 3 things, to love God, to love our neighbor, and to love creation. Love is the only thing that will endure the fire.  Everything else will be burnt away. Every sin, every idol word, and everything that is not worthy of being perfected by the master blacksmith. Now we might be used to hearing the first 2 things that I mention, love God and neighbor, but not the 3rd, love creation. As I mentioned, God's plan for creation, for this earth, was to become heaven. In other words, the vocation given to our ancestors in the Garden of Eden, which I mentioned that they frustrated, was to make the rest of the world the Garden of Eden, they were to perfect it, to make it a holy place. This vocation has not changed. We are still called to do this. That’s what you see in a church. A church is Eden, the place where heaven and earth meet. A church is this way because of how we love God and each other there, and as we leave our churches we need to go forth and make the world we live in our church. 

Demonic and Intrusive Thoughts

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Sometimes we get these thoughts that don’t go away in my tradition we call them "logismoi". We don’t know where they come from. Most of them come from demonic forces. Sometimes they implant our minds with patterns that trigger these things. Kind of like a computer virus, the kind where you realize that something shouldn’t be on your screen, so you get on your keyboard to find ways to fight it, but it only gets stronger. That’s how we approach these things sometimes and when we do it gets worse. I have experienced this many times in my life. Sometimes it will be a dark or evil thought that I don’t want to have and this thought would cause me to think bad about myself and would lead me into despair. Sometimes it would be a thought about something I did or did not do and there would be a memory of guilt that would make me feel terrible, or it would be a thought of something I would fear even though there was no need to be afraid and I would fall into paranoia. Maybe some of you know what I am talking about. For that reason, I wanted to share some things that come from my tradition, the tradition of Hesychasm that you might find helpful.

First, St. Isaac the Syrian said that each of us needs to learn to be at peace with our souls. In that, we need a little humility and acceptance of how God sees each of our minds. The mind is in a state of healing and that’s how it will remain until the resurrection, even after death the mind remains in this state. The mind is not yet what it was meant to be and for some of us they are severely damaged. Every experience we have had, good and bad, affects it, along with our own body chemistry. In regard to that chemistry demons love to take advantage of these people but none of us are without hope. Our Lord Jesus came to heal our minds all of them. That’s what he did in scripture, it says he healed the body and minds of those who came to him and that’s what he is doing now to our body and mind.

St. Maximus the Confessor taught that the mind is the eye of the soul, and its purity is essential, it is essential because we use it to see God in saying that we do have work to do in purifying it, in healing it. This is a lifelong work because, for most of us, our minds become like toilets. They keep getting filled with things that are floating around that we know we need to flush down the drain. However, the plumbing is broken so we often don’t know how to deal with our own thoughts and that is where we need to focus our attention. We need to look at how we are doing the plumbing and not necessarily the mind. The mind really is neutral ground. We can’t help what gets in there but we can do something about how we respond to it.

 

St. Gregory of Sinai recognized that we do in fact suffer from how we deal with intrusive thoughts not necessarily the thoughts themselves. In saying that we need to learn to put a distance from ourselves and what comes in our minds. We can start to do that when we see ourselves the way God sees us. He knows that we are not our thoughts or our feelings. These things do not define us in his eyes. These things belong to us but they do not determine who we are. What are persons made in the image of God. That’s what defines us, not how we feel or think. That’s not what we are always taught in our culture. For instance, people are taught to define themselves based on their sexual feelings or thoughts. You really can see the demons at work in this,  in our society. There are people who end up on quests of acceptance, like horses chasing the carrot, the carrot is the thoughts in their minds, they end up always chasing the carrot and never really find it and end up always blaming others, especially people of God who tell them what really defines us.

St. Peter of Damascus taught that remembering who we are to God is what brings people peace. In that, you have to see these thoughts as only annoying visitors. We have all experienced people like that. We might have had people like that come into our homes and be rude but for whatever reason we can’t tell them to leave. When we do ask them to leave they dig their heels in and become more rude. That’s what we do with these thoughts sometimes. We try to fight them and that is not what we should do because that’s what they want. They want us to give them that attention. They love that kind of attention. Imagine you have done all you can to get them to leave so now you turn your stereo on high to get them to leave or drown their voice out but when the song is over they are still there. This happens when we try to focus or keep busy in order to avoid the thought. We will find that it is still there when the song is over.

St. Hesychius of Jerusalem taught when we learn to focus the mind we will find peace. This is where we need to learn to use that thought. We need to use it as a means to focus on God. To do the opposite of what it seeks. The only way to get an annoying visitor to leave is to make them feel uncomfortable. They become uncomfortable when they realize that we are using them to get what we want. When they realize that they have no power over us and the key to use that thought in a way that it drives us closer to God. God uses bad stuff all the time to drive us to the good. The enemy makes bad things in order to destroy us but God, if we let him, can turn the bad into a good. This is what happened on the cross. The cross was the worst thing to happen in the world but it became the best thing. That’s what you need to learn in dealing with that thought. It’s a terrible thing but you can make it into a good thing but letting it drive you into the arms of God. Learn to redirect your mind to God.

St. John Climacus taught that the beginning of prayer is when you learn to use these thoughts to direct you to God and the fathers in hesychasm gave many ways for doing this. The first is to invoke the name of Jesus every time you have that thought. This is something we need to be vigilant about. We need to learn to continually invoke his name, that is what the apostle Paul taught, he said to pray without ceasing and this enemy in the mind can help you to do that. We need to learn to do that with all our thoughts good and bad. Sometimes the mind runs wild. Our good thoughts can become bad ones. Sometimes we think about things all day long when we shouldn’t. The mind acts like it’s our friend sometimes in trying to get us what we want but it really becomes our worst enemy when it dictates to us how we should be happy

St. Basil the Great said that a mind that is not distracted is a temple of the Holy Spirit. That is what we need to make it into. God gives us the Spirit freely, but we need to make ourselves the temple. Our bodies and minds were meant to become a dwelling place for God and that brings me back to the topic. When you continually learn to turn you mind to God, it begins to only see one thing. We need to train it to be what it was meant to be, we should always return to what the fathers call the memory of God and to make our minds deaf and dumb to everything else.

St. Hesychius of Jerusalem said "Hesychia” stillness of mind is the beginning of purity of heart. It is the foundation of all virtues and the gateway to the kingdom of heaven. When you learn to still the mind, when you learn to appropriately deal with what comes into  it, you will find peace unlike any other. That’s what Hesychia is  it’s the state you enter into that makes you receptive to the experience of God and it's something we can have if learn to deal appropriately with all our thoughts not just the ones we hate but even the good ones. Treat all your thoughts the same and use them as a springboard to God.

The Forgotten Dimension of the Jesus Prayer

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There was this group that was speaking about the Jesus Prayer and this one person got up in this group and said I just don’t understand this. The “Our Father” is a much superior prayer. It’s the prayer that Jesus taught us, not the Jesus prayer, shouldn’t we be praying that. Surprisingly, no one could give a good response. What they said was something like, “that is just our tradition”. There was also another event that triggered a question from that person. This one priest was saying that when you do the Jesus prayer we do it with our breath and the same person asked why and the response was similar “It’s our tradition and also it helps with concertation”. 

This all happened many, many years ago, and that person who asked those questions left that group never really knowing anything about the tradition of the Jesus prayer, they keep saying its our tradition, but the answers did not really spark up interest in the person and I know this because I was the person. Eventually, I was reintroduced to the tradition by priest known as Fr. Charbel Abernathy. He encouraged a study of the main texts that speak about the prayer called the Philokalia and that’s what I did for about five years and eventually I got the answers I was looking for and a realization that with the vast majority of Byzantine Christians that I met, I say byzantine because not all eastern churches have a foundation in this tradition, not one of them could give me answers to those questions I asked and the reason is that the spirituality rooted in the Jesus prayer has been separated from it and there are many reasons for that. 

The answer to my first question should have been that Jesus Prayer is not superior to the our father, nor is it in competition  to it, but it is a symbol that represents a whole spiritual tradition, and the tradition is called Hesychasm. About a thousand years ago on Mt. Athos, a spirituality prevailed that would go on to be the foundation for the Byzantine rite, this is hesychasm. The whole development of the liturgy is based on this tradition. For instance, in the tone 8 Troparion we sing, “You descend from on high, O merciful One. You accepted burial for three days to free us from our passions”.  

Now if I were to go back in time and ask what that means in that group I was in, how Christ’s bodily death free us from what it’s called passions” they would be drawing blanks. The kind of terminology used in that troparion are key words found in hesychasm and speaking of Christ's bodily death I want to go back to my other question. Why do you do this breathing, this strange thing that you do with the body. They said tradition but they did not know the tradition. They should have told me what St. Gregory of Sinai said in the Philokalia, he said, “True prayer requires the stillness of both mind and body” and this brings me to what you read in the title, the “forgotten dimension”, the forgotten dimension in the Jesus Prayer is praying with the body. 

You will find throughout the Philokalia various forms of bodily asceticism. St. John of Damaskos said that “virtues and vices of the soul and body are interconnected, and understanding this relationship is crucial for spiritual growth”. For example, you might read a spiritual remedy in the Philokalia that might tell you that if you wake up in the night struggling with lust to sleep on the ground with the window open. Sounds strange but the fathers believed in this interconnectedness and that we can use our body to fix our minds, and they also believed that the body prays.  This is why you will find, if you go to a traditional Byzantine liturgy, its like going to a gym. You stand the whole time, you are singing through the whole liturgy, bowing down prostrating and this is ultimately why we are taught to control our breath in saying the Jesus Prayer. You are making your body do the prayer, that’s also why you will find instructions on posture.

 Once in our history, we were accused of being navel gazers by people in the Western church, but what we were really doing was following instructions on how to get the body is the temple of God, not just the mind, that’s the body’s destiny and we can experience some of that now. Ultimately, God is going to finish what we started but he wants us to experience him in our bodies now. That’s something that we need to start teaching when we speak about the Jesus prayer. We need to teach people to pray with the body.

Mindfulness or Mindlessness

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I wanted to talk about what the fathers mean in Hesychasm when they want us to turn off the mind, and how that relates to Buddhism because someone made a comment that they are uncomfortable with the teaching because it sounds like Buddhism.

What you will find in Buddhism and in Hesychasm is that the mind works like an out-of-control mining drill, imagine you’re trying to get gold out of a cave wall and you're using this drill and it just keeps going when all the gold is gone, next its off for the copper, and then just for stone. That’s how the mind works. It keeps trying to find meaning, propose, control, and it does this for the purpose of pleasure and the fathers of Hesychasm and in Buddhism make the point that the mind doesn’t know when to stop mining.

The greatest example of this and that most people can relate to is to go be alone in a quiet place. The first thing your mind will do is to make you aware that it doesn’t like this so it will start daydreaming planning, or doing other things to get you out of the quiet place. The mind is even worse when it comes to prayer. It wants to take charge of the experience. It will start leading you to different images of holy ideas about God that make you feel good. It will even deceive us into believing that something is of God when it’s not because it makes us feel good.

The fathers in hesychasm will tell you that you need to turn off the drill if you really want to have an experience of God. God is in hidden that silence that we are trying to get away from and when you learn to turn off the drill that is when the encounter with God begins in prayer and the father teaches us to do that by being watchful, mindfulness as my Buddhist brothers and sisters call it. You will find the fathers in Hesychasm using different teachings on how to be watchful, same could be true for Buddhists in their teachings on mindfulness, and the greatest is how they use the Jesus prayer.  When you are praying the prayer they teach you to focus on the words and nothing else, no images, no ideas, no trying to get something out, no spiritual feelings. They teach you to let the prayer do the work for you. To trust Jesus that he is doing the work.

In doing these things you are basically trusting him with the drill. In doing so your mind will enter a state of Hesychia, stillness, and eventually as you do this, you won't even need the methods that the fathers teach you, you will be able to sit down and be still and with your will still oriented toward Jesus Christ, still letting him do the work even though you don’t see it. The evidence is in the fact that you will find peace, you will find joy, and you will find that your mind will seek him when you turn the drill back on. You will be able to have a mind that’s not out of control. A mind that works properly.

Now I want to come back to how this relates to Buddhism and in I doing that I want to quote the apostle Paul, he said, in speaking about God: that in him, we move, we breathe and have our being.  He was making a statement that God is here and God is everywhere and that by nature we can experience God in this world and it doesn’t matter what religion we are in and I can prove that was his meaning because he is quoting a Greek religious text that was talking about Zues. Now, was he promoting Hellenism the worship of Greek Gods in doing that? No, he was promoting a universal truth. Anyone can find God because God is here. The natural world was made for us to encounter God in and there is nothing more natural than our bodies.  Just because you don’t understand or get it all right, wont change the fact. Just because we live in a fallen world doesn’t change this fact.

If we are doing something good and true God will be there. This is why I believe in the Buddhist understanding of mindfulness because it is my teaching too. It’s hesychasm. Now where I will differ from a Buddhist, just as the apostle would differ from the Greek he quoted, is in the orientation to truth. In Buddhism ,it’s pretty universal that they don’t believe in personhood in their experience of mindfulness. I will be honest with my Buddhist brothers and sisters, there is a person in their silence that we are both experiencing. It’s there even if you don’t acknowledge  it.  That is why I believe hesychasm picks up where Buddhists leave off. We continue to encounter that person so that we can become the persons that we were meant to be.

Homily: Entrance of the Theotokos

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Today is the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the temple. According to tradition, at a young age Mary was dedicated to temple service. At some point during this service, she was recognized by the high priest who was given prophetic insight into her role into the salvation of the world. The priest had then brought her into the temple where she had then entered into the holy of holies and where, as we sang in our Troparion, she proclaims the coming of Christ to all.

In order to understand the significance of this feast today we need to understand that prophetic insight that the priest had for bringing Mary into the temple. In order to do that we need to understand the temple. The temple in the OT, in its design, is filled with maternal imagery and the greatest image was called the ark of the covenant. The creation of the Ark was based on what Moses had seen when he was given the commandments, when he talked to God in the heavenly temple. The Ark was a copy of what he had seen.  Moses saw the real temple and he beheld in this temple the wisdom of God. Sophia as she is called by King Solomon in the book of Proverbs. Moses was commended to copy what he had seen. In doing so he was given the blueprints for temple worship. We read about this worship in the Davidic kingship rituals that are in the Psalms.  In these rituals, those that went before the Ark in the temple were believed to be reborn as sons of God, God's representation on earth. Unfortunately, at some point in history,y the ark was lost and in losing this there would be no more sons of God, no real representation of God on earth.

By the time of the events that we are celebrating today, there were many beliefs about how the temple would be restored and how a divine son would be in the world again. The son became known as the messiah. The problem was that in order to be a messiah there needed to be an encounter with the ark. This is why the high priest brought Mary into the temple; he was bringing the Ark back to its rightful place. The difference is that this ark was not the copy, of what Moses had built, it was the actual thing that Moses saw, It was the real thing, it was that wisdom of God, that which would give birth to thee Son of God.

As you see above behind me in the icon (there was an icon behind me of the Theotokos) the Theotokos remains in her proper place in the true temple, the temple that’s not made with human hands, not the copy, she is the true ark in the temple, she is what Moses had seen, she is the divine wisdom Solom spoke about, Sophia, and as of such, she is still giving birth to children of God. We are her children and today we are going to renew that bond with her when we partake of her flesh in the Eucharist. As our Byzantine Father St. Symeon the New Theologian teaches, in the Eucharist our Lord gives us his flesh, making us what he is, his flesh becomes our flesh as we receive it our body, it becomes our very own, in doing so he becomes our brother and God becomes our Father, and Mary becomes our mother. For it is from her flesh that he becomes one of us and he gives us this flesh that he gets from her today, which makes her become our mother in every way.

As her children, she is counting on us to make her family grow. She wants to be mother to us all. In order for that to happen we need to go out into the world and show people the benefits of being her children. There is an unfortunate word that the bible uses for people that are not her children. The Bible calls them the children of wrath. The people of this world are living under the bondage of the devil and some of these people will end up in an unfortunate fate if we don’t do something about it. These people need to see an alternative to the way that they are living now.

Showing these people an alternative is not complicated. When our Mother appeared as our Lady of La Salette she said we need to obey. Obedience is the path for how the world will be saved.  Our obedience to the teachings of Christ is what will save us and those around us. Its what makes the presence of the Holy Spirit active in this world. Our obedience reveals the power of the holy spirit and is what shows the world that we are in fact her children and today that is what our Mother is asking from her sons and daughters. Be obedient. Show people the Holy Spirit. Obedience is the key. As our Lord said in the gospel today blessed are those who hear the word of God and Keep it. Blessed are the obedient. Glory to Jesus Christ.