Orthodox Wisdom Newsletter

“God appointed the salvation of the world to His Son and not to us…. We must first look at our soul and if we can, let’s help five or six people around us.”

~ Elder Epiphanios (Theodoropoulos), Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit

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Gentleness as a Mindset (+ “Vocation?”) – Dr. Albert Rossi

☦️ Dear fellow pilgrim,

ICYMI: I was honored this week to have been mentioned (twice!) in Paul Kingsnorth’s latest essay, “Orthodoxy for Beginners.”

This week I was reminded of the following account from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (a book I can’t recommend highly enough!):

The Holy Fathers were making predictions about the last generation. They said, “What have we ourselves done?” One of them, the great Abba Ischyrion replied, “We ourselves have fulfilled the commandments of God.” The others replied, “And those who come after us, what will they do?” He said, “They will struggle to achieve half our works.” They said, “And those who come after them, what will happen?” He said, “The men of that generation will not accomplish any works at all and temptation will come upon them; and those who will be approved in that day will be greater than either us or our fathers.”

~ The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

There are a variety of similar accounts in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the gist of which is: the spiritual situation of future generations will be more challenging than that of our own, and so God will judge those generations differently. Was this simply humility on the part of Abba Ischyrion? Perhaps, but likely not. A similar sentiment can be found in other patristic texts (I’m thinking, in particular, of St. Dorotheos of Gaza’s account of two twins separated early on, and raised in very different environments – St. Dorotheos says that God will judge each twin differently based on the opportunities they had been given).

This should be a reminder that it is never our place to judge, but also that at the heart of Orthodox Christianity is the Spirit of God Who is in all places and fills all things, and that it should be the goal of every Orthodox Christian to acquire the Spirit of God so that we may know how to act every moment of every day. This is not to negate the commandments of God, but to realize that we live in a unique time in history and that wisdom is not found in simply reading the Fathers and trying to implement their teachings, but firstly to discern the Spirit behind their words and to seek to acquire this Spirit so as to understand how to fulfill God’s commandments in our own day.

I wrote Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit: The Lives and Counsels of Contemporary Elders of Greece because of my conviction that our contemporary Saints are the most powerful witnesses to the vibrancy and truth of the Orthodox Christian path in the 21st century. When one begins to acquire the Spirit of God, one discerns that the ancient Fathers were saying the same things as our contemporary Fathers, they were simply doing so according to their own (ancient) reality.

One of the difficulties in discerning the true Orthodox path is that there is always a healthy tension between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. Christ did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17), but it is the work of each generation of Orthodox Christians to acquire and to discern the Spirit of God so as to know how to fulfill the Law in a salvific way.

May God grant us the wisdom to acquire and to discern the Spirit of God!

In Christ our Lord,

Herman