The Holy Gospel of grace is hidden with Christ in God in worlds of pride and vainglory, worlds that reject wisdom, but wisdom is revealed in realms of glory that humbly trust the Holy Name to save. Indeed, there is no Gospel of Grace when religion is reduced to individual effort and struggle, when salvation lies in an inaccessible and hidden future…. Read more »
It is self-evident to pride that we must save ourselves by believing right things and doing things right, because being saved by grace is literally inconceivable. Proud self-righteousness is a very anxious business because it is haunted by fear that it is in the wrong, anxious that pride puts it in the wrong by falling short of glory. Pride lives very close to… Read more »
The Spirit proceeds from the Father to abide in the Son, drawing us into his ineffable abiding in the primordial union of the Son with the Father, restoring glory to the Father through the Son. Abiding in God’s ineffable openness, the uncreated oneness of God is spontaneously present as a womb of indescribable glory. Wisdom discerns the wondrous self-emptying of the… Read more »
Wisdom remains hidden whilst purification is curing pride, but is revealed when illumination begins to heal the confusions of pride and divisions of vainglory. Self-condemnation to hell without despair condemns pride to hell and so is actually the initial unveiling of the energy of uncreated light, curing pride and opening wisdom to glory purified of vanity. Grace takes this form… Read more »
When pride arose, Saint Silouan the Athonite was given self-condemnation to hell without despair, initiating Saint Sophrony the Hesychast into holy self-hatred with trust in the grace of the Name to save. From the perspective of negative asceticism, wisdom appears to be pride and is condemned together with pride. Whilst pride is arising, wisdom is indeed providentially hidden and so are… Read more »
Standing back from the incompleteness of life’s strains and stresses, wisdom turns and sees the glory of timeless freedom in the hallowed realms of union and communion. Anxiety resists hallowing communion but dissolves when union weds time with timeless wisdom, releasing illumination into glorification. Prophecy regenerates the imagination with new ways of telling old stories, whilst prayer of the… Read more »
The wisdom of Christ holds everything together, including the paradox of time and the timeless. Christ is divine-human, so his wisdom is uncreated yet also created, curing confusion whilst healing division. Gathering what was scattered, wisdom discerns the glory of grace, integrating apparently exclusive opposites. The story is dialectical when it discerns the unfolding of divine-human coherence in time, but paradoxical… Read more »
The prayer of stillness anchored childhood and adolescence in a revelation of love and peace which was newly inspired, in the summer of 1965, by a meeting with Saint Sophrony the Hesychast, prior to a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, at the age of twenty, in the company of my father. Saint Sophrony introduced me to the practice of Hesychast wisdom by communicating… Read more »
From childhood, at my mother’s knee, the prayer of stillness lay at the heart of daily prayer: ‘Be still and know that I AM God.’ ‘Seek ye my Face; Thy Face, Lord will I seek.’ Still, still, very still, hands are folded, very still. Keep our minds and bodies still, for a moment, deep and still. Now I am ready for hearing God,… Read more »
The Hagioritic Tome (1340) of Saint Gregory Palamas bears witness to the experience of purification, illumination and glorification that inspires Hesychast saints, insisting that the light of purifying illumination and glorification is uncreated because God’s energies of light and glory are uncreated. The noetic awareness of the heart is transfigured with uncreated light and deifying glory, opening hearts to the… Read more »