Homily at the 10th Sunday after Pentecost [2012]
My Beloved,
What means, in fact, not having binge/ desire for life?
What means to be alive, healthy, with everything…and, in the same time, not to feel happy with what you have and with who you are and with what you do?
It means that you are spiritually and emotionally empty.
It means that you need by grace, by ecclesial, liturgical, ascetic, theological fulfillment and, in the same time, by scientific, cultural, technological fulfillment…
For that the man who is bored by life is the man who does not look life profoundly.
Which does not seeks to know and to understand people, history, things…but watching them peripheral, at surface…finds that there is nothing to know.
Nothing more false!
Life is full of sense, of joy, of binge/ of desire for life when you feel that your deepeners give results.
You begin to learn a foreign language. You begin to learn how to use your computer, mobile phone, a car…
You begin to read about a certain historical period. You begin to search new combinations of herbs or ingredients for food.
You begin to learn a trade, something that requires effort, skill…but and discovery continues.
And this new, this continuous new in our lives, besides continuous novelty of prayer, of fasting, of theological knowledge is our desire for life. They are our non-molestation.
Therefore I consider that Orthodoxies do not have time to get bored.
Yes, you can mentally and physically exhaust…
You can get tired very much…
But one thing is tired you work fulfilling and another is you grow old doing nothing, lack of sense, the unfulfilment…the failure…
The fatigue fulfilling means the ascesis.
And ascesis does not consist only in prayer, fasting and prostrations, as often it is believed… but and in the writing at computer, in the writing of books, in the reading of books, in the taken by notes, in the made of food, in the washing of clothes, in the cultivation of field, in the cleaning done in house and Church…in all that means effort beautiful, fulfilling.
Everything you do for God and neighbor means the ascesis.
And in today’s Evangel [Mt. 17, 14-23] – in that a child is exorcised by the Lord and thus he is released by the devil that made him a lunatic (with symptoms suspicious of „disease” at different phases of the moon) – are discussed from full about the ascesis.
About the ascesis which proves full of faith in God (v. 20) and of love of neighbor (v. 21).
And the last sermon from Praedicationes (vol. 2), volume recently edited, is the sermon at this Sunday…the sermon from 2008…and there I spoke, at length, about exorcism…and about what happens, in fact, in the frame of its.
About as real and vengeful are demons, about how painful and depersonalized is the possession by demons and about the prayers of the Church that heals on man by Satanization.
…But just as legitimate is the question, born from v. the 20th: who will move mountains of boredom, of disbelief, of unshamefacedness, of the lack of verticality from us?
For that the depression, fear, shamelessness, hypocrisy, duplicity, arrogance, infatuation, fornication, lying, heresy are all many mountains, are all many tombstones over…our happiness.
And at the question that necessarily, the answer of the truth…the real answer…comes from the Lord: if we have little faith in God as a mustard seed of high in our hearts…if we have but little confidence in God we move mountains (v. 20).
We move all mountains that stop us happiness.
And I remember the days past, when no gurgling in me, in acknowledged mode, the source of the divine grace…that I was avid by a joy, by a peace, by a plenary understanding of things…that I was prefelted it and I did not get.
I intuited that there is something more, that life and joy and fulfillment to be something stable, something ingrained in us and not transitory things, flashing, fleeting…
But when I saw and felt His glory, of Trinitarian God, when He made known to me in the beauty and His imperishable joy then my intuition, my prefeeling became reality…personal reality…and I understand that I must fight, in me myself, with all what is non–beauty and non–joy.
That is to fight with any thought, any feeling, any idea, any passion which replaces the divine happiness with the sadness, with the misery…
And therefore, I confess with all my being, the ontological illegitimacy of mountains of passions in us.
They are not always in us…they were not born from God…but they are the creation of the inclination toward evil of our person.
Just therefore the mountains of passions from our heart, which destroy our happiness, are the fruit of our irresponsibility.
And we are irresponsible in any moment in that the leave to enter in us and to make chicks thoughts, feelings, ideas, modes of being and behaving that have not the imprint of the divine grace but are sins.
But…as we find here, at v. 20-21 from Matthew 17, the continuous ascesis, the ongoing effort, born from faith in God, means continuous eradication of the sin, under all forms, from our life.
And continues eradication, the real eradication, the real cleaning of passions sees in desire of life, in the personal fulfillment, in the giving and the beauty of soul which we irradiated around.
Yes, there is no mountain, no obstacle, no inner weakness…cannot be passed through faith!
All things are possible…if we trust in God and if we work the good in ascetic mode. With all conscience and dedication.
And then the demons come out of us…as coming out of this kid…
For that they are the ones that bring us lazy, non-care, callousness, lack of will, sinking in pleasure, in fear, the curiosities disappointing.
They make us tons of insensibility…on us, those who have to fly like a bird, towards the Lord of glory.
Therefore the Lord to give us the good thought, ie the finding of ourselves, for that to understand what we accomplished…and to work with joy what we accomplished.
For that only thus we are happy, beautiful at conscience, fulfilled in our lives…and the results of our lives are overwhelming for all.
Lord blesses us with peace and with much joy in this fast of His Mother, for that we understand that without His joy our life is a great and sad sadness. Amen!