REMEMBER, THOU CAME FROM DUST, AND TO DUST THOU SHALL RETURN! On Ashe Wednesday, as the ashes penetrated the foreheads of Gods children in the image of a cross we seem to have demonstrated some kind of act of madness in this post-modern world. Marring our faces with the very symbol of death, how disgusting it must be to the hedonistic mindset of the world. Abbot Anthony says, A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they meet someone who is not mad, they will turn to him and say, you are out of your mind, just because he is not like them. --Sayings of the Desert Fathers Anthony, 25 (Pg 65,84). We human beings are just fragments of life. We live a dead life, according to Gregory of Nyssa, in a world permeated by death, in which everything gravitates continually towards nothingness and this is the root of all our hostility, unkindness, troubles, and fears. Unlike the animals, we know we are going to die. This knowledge, being the source of our distress, is also a source of grace, for it betrays a longing for being and unity, longing to know the Creator and the One True God. Listen to the words of Augustine of Hippo, the Western Church Father: Brethren, do our years last? They slip away day by day. Those which were, no longer are; those to come are not yet here. the former are past, the latter will come, only to pass away in their turn. Today exists only in the moment in which we speak. Its first hours have passed, the remainder do not yet exist; they will come, but only to fall into nothingness...Nothing contains constancy in itself. The body does not process being; it has no permanence. It changes with age, it changes with time and place, it changes with illness and accident. The stars have as little constancy; they change in hidden ways, they go whirling though space... they are not steady, they do not possess being. Nor is the human heart any more constant. How many thoughts disturb it, how may ambitions! How many pleasures draw it this way and that, tearing it apart! The human spirit itself, although endowed with reason, changes; it does not possess being. It wills and do not will; it knows an does not know; it remembers and forgets. No one has in himself the unity of being.... After so many sufferings, diseases, troubles and pains, let us return humbly to that One Being. Let us enter into that city whose inhabitants share in Being itself. Humans have attempted to achieve unity by themselves, to be their own masters and to depend only on themselves. But that is an adventure like Lucifers which has left us in anarchy, terrorism, skepticism, and denial. That is why repentance, the great turning around of the mind and heart, and of our whole grasp of reality is, the daughter of all hope. It is the renunciation of despair. Communion with God is life, and separation from God is death. Life without eternity is unworthy of the name of life. Only eternal life is true. Yes, turning fully to God these days is generally considered madness. People hope to escape death by sleep-walking in the pursuit of popularity, possessions, power, or by losing themselves in frantic activities. For us who are in pursuit of the Kingdom of God on earth, we can accept the call to fearlessly take up our cross and die daily and thus escape madness of this world.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 10:00:06 +0000
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