http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BQ6ehc9EjA&feature=fvst

30 March 2012
Our Venerable Father John Climacus, Author of the Ladder and Venerable John the Silent
I have posted above a URL address for a concert conducted and played by Mitsuko Uchida, she says more through her playing and expression that I could hope to.
I have been thinking a lot about why it can seem so important to try and express and articulate what happens to us in the deepest prayer.
At first I was worried it might just be a false pride and some need to appear holy but as I looked deeper and prayed about it, and frankly as I watched this video mentioned above I realized there is something about the experience of God's touch, a touch that at once wounds and heals us, a touch that draws us every more ardently towards union with the One Who Loves us so much, cannot be experienced without an intense desire to articulate and share that experience.
I think this is so, because something deep inside of us know we are all connected and thus there is a natural desire to share good things.
Mitsuko Uchida is someone who becomes one with the music, she is literally moved by it and this can be seen and heard. I feel strongly that what she demonstrates so naturally and uninhibitedly gives us a glimpse of something that we are all called to, something that we can share and that can help us to grow into the fullness of the stature of Jesus Christ who is our unique Model and Lord.
Pascha/Easter is fast approaching but not before we remember the Passion and Death, descent into hell and finally the Resurrection of Jesus. My prayer is that we will walk through these mysteries slowly and prayerfully, unafraid to allow ourselves to delve deeply into such Love, a love willing to undergo death and hell to bring us through them to life eternal.

14 March 2012

 

It has been a while. We are in the fourth week of the Great Lent already, where does the time go?

 

This time of year always seems to awaken something deep inside of me. It is as if the whole of creation is conspiring to reawaken in us the fact that we are not at home. It is as if creation is whispering with our hearts, "I long to see Your Face O Lord."

I am in the process of letting myself trust God's Love in my life without having to have all the answers. I am in the process of being taken into the mystery of living the journey and realizing in it a dynamic destination that is both here and now and still "not yet".

 

I feel almost like a little baby who has been picked up by a loving Father, with the exception that the baby would not be able to articulate or perhaps even reflect on the experience whereas I can be in the experience and also reflect and articulate it. I feel like prayer is becoming alive in me. Rather than me praying it feels like I am being prayed in and through.

 

The temptation is to grab onto this experience and to try and possess it but I know in the deepest part of who I am that it is only in the letting go and the letting be that this experience can be appreciated and nurtured and lived out in the present moment. It feels at one and the same time frightening and yet absolutely peaceful letting God love me, not resisting or pleading guilty and unworthy because of my sinfulness.

 

Rather realizing that it is my sinfulness and brokenness that has drawn Love Himself to me and wrapped me in His mantle of Mercy, Forgiveness and Unconditional. Love.  

 

What’s left is to be utterly grateful and to walk in and live out that gratitude in the thousand opportunities that come up each day in the seemingly ordinary and hum drum routines of life. Hidden in each moment is the possibility and potential of encounter and communion with the Source of our being.

Preparing for Great Lent

31 January 2012
What is the Great Lent all about anyway? And why should we care? Fr. Alexander Schmemann, in his book, "Great Lent" Journey to Pascha, leads us through reflection, his own experience and the wisdom of the Church Fathers, Scripture and Tradition into an understanding of why we need to make this journey every year.
"Repentance, we are told, is the beginning and the condition of a truly Christian life. Christ's first word when he began to preach was: "Repent!" (Matt. 4:17)."
The Greek word for "repent" means literally to "turn back or turn around in another direction." Another way to look at this would be to say, to get on the right track, to go in the right direction.
What though is the right direction and how can we come to know it and then as importantly to seek and find it?
Schmemann writes: "Above all, Lent is a spiritual journey and its destination is Easter, "the Feast of Feasts." What we celebrate he says is," the new life, which almost two thousand years ago shone forth from the grave, has been given to us who believe in Christ. And it was given to us on the day of our Baptism, in which, as St. Paul says, we "were buried with Christ . . . unto death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead we also may walk in the newness of life." (Rom. 6:4). Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ's Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us."