What was Jesus doing before He was transfigured? Luke 9:28-29 says that he went up on the mountain to pray, and as He was praying, He was transfigured before them. St Gregory Palamas says that Jesus did not need to pray to be transfigured, because Jesus was God. We are not told that Jesus prayed because it was necessary for Him. We are told that the Transfiguration took place while He was praying because it is necessary for us. If we wish to see the things of heaven, then we must be men and women who pray. And not just men and women who pray say 5 minutes of prayer in the morning and then go on with the rest of our life until we’re beat and tired, and then say 5 minutes of prayer before we fall back into bed. That’s not what we mean. St Paul says, “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). Every second of the day must be prayer. You can receive Holy Communion without tasting that the Lord is good, because if you receive Holy Communion without prayer, then your body and soul have not received the grace of God. To taste heavenly food, we must pray. To hear angels, we must pray. To feel the presence of God and the saints, we must pray. We must work and labour in prayer so that we can fulfil the purpose of our existence.
Sometimes God allows for a relative or a fellow worker to cause us problems in order to exercise our patience and humbleness; however, instead of being grateful for the chance God gives us, we react and refuse to be cured. It is like refusing to pay the doctor who is giving us a shot when we are sick.
Our duty and concern must be how to please God and our fellow man; we should not be preoccupied with our needs, as God will take care of them. There is a silent spiritual agreement between God and man. He will look after us, while we will concentrate on how to live our lives according to His will. “Cast all your anxieties on Him, for he cares for you.”
Father Paisios of Mount Athos
The devil cunningly induces us- instead of arousing us against himself- to notice our neighbours’ sins, to make us spiteful and angry with others, and to awaken our contempt towards them, thus keeping us in enmity with them, and with the Lord God Himself. Therefore, we must despise the sins themselves, and not our brother, who commits them at the devil’s prompting, through infirmity and habit; we must pity him, and gently and lovingly instruct him, as one who forgets himself, or who is sick, as a prisoner and the slave of his sin.
The righteous Christian does not practice good acts for his own benefit, i.e. in order to be rewarded or to avoid hell and gain paradise, but rather because he prefers good to evil. Everything else is a natural consequence of the good that fills our soul without having asked for it. This way, good has dignity; otherwise, it originates from the cheap attitude of “give and take.”
Doing the will of God is a discipline in the best sense of the word. It is also a test of our loyalty, of our fidelity to Christ. It is by doing in every detail, at every moment, to the utmost of our power, as perfectly as we can, with the greatest moral integrity, using our intelligence, our imagination, our will, our skill, our experience, that we can gradually learn to be strictly, earnestly obedient to the Lord God. Unless we do this our discipleship is an illusion. Αnd if our life of discipline is a set of self-imposed rules in which we delight, which makes us proud and self-satisfied, it will leave us nowhere, because the essential momentum of our discipleship is the ability in this process of silence and listening, to reject our self, to allow the Lord Christ to be our mind, our will and our heart. Unless we renounce ourselves and accept his life in place of our life, unless we aim at what St Paul defines as “it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me”, we shall never be either disciplined or disciples.”
Value by its effects that greatest miracle of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, manifested when we partake with faith of his divine sacraments- Holy Communion. What is this miracle? The access of peace and life to your heart, to a heart killed by sin, which is so apparent from the uneasiness of heart and spiritual deadness that often precedes Communion. Never consider it from habit as anything ordinary or unimportant: by such thoughts you will incur the wrath of God, and you will not enjoy peace nor feel renewed life after Communion. By having lively and heart-felt gratitude for the holy and life-giving sacrament you will obtain Life from the Lord, and your faith will increase more and more.
A psychologist once asked 3,000 persons, “What are you living for?” He was startled to find that most of them were simply enduring the present while they waited for something better in the future. Actors doing small parts were waiting for the “big chance”. People in business were thinking of their present jobs as drudgery, a mere marking of time, until fate opened the door to something better. One middle aged mother said, “I only hope that my nerves can stand the ordeal until my husband retires and the children get homes of their own, and then I can get a little rest.” When this all happened, this same mother was a very unhappy person. She looked back to the time when she was busy and the house full of children as the happiest period of her life… “Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor. 6:2) Now– not tomorrow– is the time to live. Now– not tomorrow– is the time to be saved, to be made whole. Our time on earth is limited. Every moment is unique and unrepeatable. Tomorrow is not ours, today is. Now is the time to do the compassionate act. Now is the time to say the word of forgiveness– before our time runs out. Now is the most glorious period of life. God’s time is always now.
The Lord, before His incarnation, let man experience all the bitterness of sin, all his powerlessness to eradicate it; and when all longed for a deliverer, then He appeared, the all-wise and all-powerful healer and helper. When men hungered and thirsted after righteousness as it grew weaker, then the everlasting righteousness came....
This is indeed the miracle of miracles; this reveals the infinite mercy, wisdom, and omnipotence of the Lord towards His creatures, that He Himself, the Lord of all, the infinite, the unbounded, was pleased and was able to become man that we might be saved, that the Word, by whom all things were made, was made flesh and dwelt among us, living with men, and made like unto man in everything, sin alone excepted.
You keep writing about your troubles and your inner disorder. Realise that it cannot be otherwise in the temporal life, and do not try to find out from whom and through whom they come, for they do not come without God’s permission. If not even a hair of our head will perish, how much more sure is God’s protection of man. It is also said: “By your endurance you will gain your lives.” (Luke 21:18-19) I have already written to you before that there is just one way to deal with sorrows: prayer and patience.
At a time of trouble wait for peace, and when there is peace prepare for trouble. In this temporal life peaceful and troubled times alternate. Even the holy men of God were not free from these changes. But you want to find some new path in order to escape hard experiences. This cannot be. You haven’t had abuse hurled at you or been struck on the cheeks, have you? Just remember the patience of the God incarnate: the blows on the cheeks, the hitting on the head with a stick, the spitting in his face and many kinds of ridicule. And he endured all this for the sake of our salvation. But we do not want, for the sake of our own salvation, to suffer even small annoyances.
Father John, a Russian monk
Hallowed Be Thy Name. We sanctify the name of the Father in grace who is in heaven by mortifying earthly lust, of course, and by purifying ourselves from corrupting passions, since sanctification is the total immobility and mortification of sensual lust. Arrived at that point, we quiet down the indecent howling of anger which no longer has, to excite it and persuade it to be carried over to familiar pleasures, the lust which is already mortified by a holiness conformed to reason. Indeed, anger, as a natural ally of lust, ceases to rage once it sees that lust is mortified.
Maximus the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father
A basic condition for the spiritual life is that we should understand that, on our own, we can do absolutely nothing. No matter how hard we try, the spiritual life is something that someone else gives to us. And the “someone else” is the Spirit of God, the Comforter, the “treasury of good things and the giver of life”, the treasury from which all the riches of spirituality come forth, the source from which the spiritual life emerges and overflows. Of course, sometimes we get confused, and think that to be spiritual means to be a “good person”: not to steal, not to kill, not to go to bad places or with bad friends, to go to Church on Sunday, to read spiritual books, and so on.
But no, this is not the spiritual life. A spiritual person, a true Christian, is someone whose entire life is sworn to God. Initially by means of his baptism, and later, in his heart, such a person swears an oath to God, to live for God, and to remain with God forever. A spiritual person is an athlete who has burst into life, who stands out from the crowds of human beings, and runs with all the speed of his soul to heaven. A spiritual person is one who with shining eyes and chest thrust forward, has set his course and races to heaven. He is not a “good man”. A spiritual person knows that, in order to succeed, he needs strong wings: the wings of the Holy Spirit.A spiritual person must therefore do everything possible to attract, to win over, the Spirit of God, because only the Holy Spirit, God himself, has the gifts of the spiritual life. According to St Gregory of Nyssa, the “distribution of the royal gifts” of the Holy Spirit takes place in the Church through the Sacraments.
Fr Aimilianos of Simonopetra
Do not say: “I do not know what is right, therefore I am not to blame when I fail to do it.” For if you did all the good about which you do know, what you should do next would then become clear to you, as if you were passing through a house from one room to another. It is not helpful to know what comes later before you have done what comes first. For knowledge without action “puffs up”, but “loves edifies”, because it “patiently accepts all things” (1 Cor. 8:1; 13:7).
Mark the Ascetic in Philokalia, volume 1
St Luke tells us that the Transfiguration took place while Jesus was praying. Is it not in periods of prayer that we are most likely to witness the glory of God? Is it not prayer that produces an inner change in man which becomes reflected in a transfigured life?
St Silouan declared that the Spirit brought him through torments of doubt to the firm conviction that “Jesus Christ is God.” This Spirit, who bestows the gift of faith, fills every aspect of our life and leads us progressively toward the twin goals of Knowledge of God and Love of Enemies. If we can know anything at all of God, and even enter into the most intimate communion with Him, it is only because God grants us this mystical knowledge by His Spirit, who dwells within the temple of the heart. If we can love even our enemy, it is only with the compassion and mercy of God Himself, who infuses our heart with the transforming grace of the Spirit. This is a grace that lifts us above our passions- corrupted feelings of victimization and shame, of anxiety and defensive rage- and enables us, in the power of the Spirit, to embrace with love even those who hate us, who threaten us, and who, on a purely human level, inspire our contempt and loathing...One of the greatest and most illuminating gifts we receive from the Spirit is recognition and acceptance of the fact that we are often our own worst enemy. It is that burdensome fact that can lead us to make enemies even of those who are closest to us. Little irritations can transform an insignificant incident into a household drama that creates tension, alienation and rejection. The ascetic life is made up of struggles against just these kinds of temptations. There needs to be a change of heart that only God can accomplish. “The Lord’s love,” Silouan declares, “is made known in no other wise than through the Holy Spirit.”
Taken from the book Longing for God, by Fr John Breck
