Patience under Pressure: Beginning the Dormition Fast

"When the Holy Apostles confessed the Saviour to be the Son of God, He said, I must…suffer…and be killed. The work had ripened; it remained only to complete it through the death on the cross. The same thing occurs in the course of a Christian’s moral progress. While he is struggling with his passions, the enemy still hopes somehow to tempt him; but when passions have settled down and the enemy no longer has enough power to awaken them, he presents external temptations, all sorts of wrongful accusations, moreover, the most sensitive. He tries to plant the thought: “So what did you work and struggle for? No good will come of it for you.” But when the enemy thus prepares a war from without, the Lord sends down the spirit of patience to his struggler, thereby preparing a lively readiness in his heart for all sorts of suffering and hostility before the enemy can manage to stir up trouble. As the Lord said about Himself, I must suffer, spiritual strugglers also feel a sort of thirst for sorrows. And when the suffering and hostility come, they meet them with joy, and drink them in like a thirsting man drinks cooling water." -- St. Theophan the Recluse

And this from the Holy Apostle Paul's lesson to us for today, the Friday of the 8th Week after Pentecost.

... when you assemble as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and I partly believe it, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. (1 Corinthians 11:19)

And our gospel teacher today, Matthew the Holy Apostle and Evangelist, tells us this of Jesus

And Jesus answered, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me." And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly. (Matthew 17:18)

Strife, discord, demonic influence, accusations, war in the spirit, even war against the Spirit. Some call these things "enemies of salvation." Such they may be, but perhaps they are not always. After all, "whom the Lord loves He chastises." See how these antagonisms are not the enemy, but the elements the Enemy employs as weapons for his own purpose to turn our minds and hearts to attend to anything, good or bad, that is not directed toward our salvation in Jesus Christ. Seen this way, these sorrows are not our enemies, but simply the ground of this earthly life against which our faith is strengthened to endure. In the face of them, and by the grace of God, we believers remain impassive and assured of salvation in the Lord.

Listen again to what the holy bishop Theophan has said we gain in the midst of these difficulties: "the Lord sends down the spirit of patience to his struggler, thereby preparing a lively readiness in his heart for all sorts of suffering ..." and this "before the enemy can manage to stir up trouble" (emphasis mine).

Before, during, and after the afflictions we are with the Lord, and He with us. Only in the impassioned variability of our pride and will to self-aggrandizement, can we depart from the Holy Spirit's unwavering protection and grace that is given only to the humble.

And how we are protected by the Lord and His own patience with us! Even though, as St. Matthew has just taught us, we do test the Lord's patience by our perversity and infidelity toward His goodness. Yet our missteps and poor judgments and sins -- our very freedoms misused -- are allowed by the Lord, "so that those who are genuine among you may be recognized."

The Lord's rebuke in the gospel lesson is not only for the demons that have seized and tormented their victim. He also rebukes us, who protest we are merely "innocent bystanders", in the process of his "ekballistic ministry." It is, in a sense, this very rebuke of our own twisted wills and unfaithful hearts that brings the exorcism to effect. It is in humble acceptance of God's rightful opinion of us as perverse and unfaithful that we accede to His driving from our midst the parasite evil that is in this good, God-made world. We veritably require this chastisement on account of our own perverse misuse, individually as believers and collectively as a church, of "the glorious liberty of the sons of God."

This is why, in the midst of strife and discord, we are ALL called to heartfelt repentance, to renewed fear of God, to perduring faith, to supernatural hope and to sacrificial love. By our patient endurance and "thirst for sorrows" we will we gain our souls' salvation and bring peace and reconciliation to that which is sundered by so closely-clinging sin and the world of spiritual ignorance.

Let us therefore eagerly begin the coming "fast-before-the-feast" of the Death of the Most Holy Theotokos, the Mother of our Life; let us begin it with the sure expectation of the unexpected joy that comes to us in her who by the fulness of divine grace has borne in herself the Lord's own deathless death and glorious resurrection;

By each of us now taking up our Cross, we eagerly await and, if God so wills, we may earnestly acquire "a life translated to Life," ever present in and among us believers whenever and wherever we "assemble as a church."

By the prayers of the Theotokos, O Savior, save us!

[Your comments are most welcome.]