Sermons & Homilies
Perseverance is not just waiting. Waiting and thinking. Waiting anxiously. Waiting and despairing. It is not biding time until the problem (or worse, the person) goes away. Perseverance is a positive action. It is turning away from ourselves and our problems and our failures and looking toward Christ.
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Now that we finish celebrating the liturgical cycle of the Lord’s birth, the Church, like Symeon, directs our gaze to the Cross and death of the Lord. She tells us, in effect, that if we want to find rest in God and greet death joyfully like Symeon, then we must embrace the Cross of the Lord. If we want to say like Symeon, “I have enough,” a sword must also pierce our hearts.
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All of us are born into this world with a deep and insatiable longing for Paradise. Perhaps we are not even aware of it. Most of us bury it beneath the mire of our passions; we try to satisfy this pure and holy desire with the trinkets and amusements of this fallen world. We become as ships tossed to and fro, as wanderers amid the wasteland of this life, consumed by a gnawing hunger for we know not what. But no matter how we might try to slake our endless, unquenchable desire, we all — like the Prodigal Sons that we are — always end up finding ourselves enslaved to our passions, perishing with hunger, and very, very far away from home.
God is always providing a means to grant us humility. But humility cannot be acquired without humiliation. Humiliation comes about either through our interior passions and falls into sin, or from painful circumstances of body or soul, or from our brother, or by the feeling of God’s grace having withdrawn from our soul, or from all of these together, or a combination of some of them.
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Our brother is our life. We’ve all heard this saying before. But have we really grasped it yet? Have we actually started to live it ourselves? Does it bear any relation to how we experience each day of our monastic life? Even in the monastery—or we might say, especially in the monastery—the force of this saying can be lost on us. Instead, we see our brethren as obstacles to be overcome, as burdens to be endured, as competitors to be defeated, or nuisances to be ignored.
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