Monday, May 28, 2018

In Prayer, the Foretate of the Heavenly Kingdom

After attaining silence in prayer and the intense desire for the Holy Spirit we realize that He is very close. We want even more to draw Him inside us so we can be renewed and cleansed of every stain our soul may have. We witness a mystical expectation. This is when we Elder Aimilianos says we will we receive the delight of the silent foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Elder Aimilianos says,
Why?... Because God is in the heavens, I’m here, and so this delight which I will have, this prelude, must, let’s say, be a kind of prior introduction for me into the bosom of the Kingdom of Heaven. It must be my first, distant intelligence of the sounds and angelic voices which are heard up there. And it follows that I become aware, more or less, of what Paradise is, what the Kingdom of Heaven is. ...I have to find out where He is and know what it is that He is in.
At this stage we begin to have some ideas about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven. We begin to gain glimpses into the answers to our questions about the heavenly realm. What is heaven? What is it like there? Are their dwellings? What are the saints and where are they? What is Christ like there? What is the Holy Trinity? Receiving these insights we still know we are far away, but now we can begin to see beyond the most distant star this distant Kingdom that awaits us.

The Elder says,
I begin to understand and my soul starts to be warmed by these mysteries which, to some extent, are beginning to be revealed to me. And then, my beloved brethren, there begins - let me put it like this - a new period in my spiritual life: luxuriating in silence or silence in luxuriating. In other words, something different.
He describes this as a different silence, silence of our spirit, of the eyes of our soul. Previously it was a silence of our faculties. Now we find ourselves in the silence of our spiritual world. We lose ourself in this world and find ourselves before the gates of Heaven.

The Elder describes like this,
Since I find myself before the gates of Heaven, I luxuriate, I enjoy a warmth, a coziness and I keep silent, in order to be able to hear His voice. Now, however, as we said, my spirit is silent, the spirit which will cry, “Abba, Father!”. Now it’s silent, I’m happy. I have a warmth inside me, even bodily. I’m at rest. I’m relaxed. I’m in the mood to pray. I don’t want to pray though, I want to wait for God.
Next the Holy Spirit comes and it’s me with God.

Monday, May 21, 2018

In Prayer: When the Holy Spirit Enters



Continuing with the teaching on Prayer by Elder Aimilianos: He has lead us from a dry struggle to silence, to a desire for the Holy Spirit and the awareness of the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, waiting in anticipation of the Holy Spirit which seems to be nearby. Now he tells us about the entrance of the Holy Spirit into our prayer.

He writes,
The Holy Spirit begins to blow. It is the Holy Spirit who unites me to God, Who brings me into contact as regards His energies and I begin to have an inkling of what is happening. Then the Holy Spirit, Who is light, when He enters into me, reveals to me the depths of my heart.
We are unaware of what lingers in the depths of our hearts. So much of who we are lies hidden from us until the Holy Spirit enters.

He says,
When the Spirit comes close, He reveals to me, my beloved brethren, the blackness inside me, my sins, and I begin to have knowledge of myself. In physical silence, in spiritual silence, God begins to communicate with me by revealing what lingers in the depth of my soul.
 The Elder says it is “like a spotlight and illumines my heart.” ...I come to understand two things. God shows me through the entrance of the Holy Spirit that it is in the center of my soul, my heart, where I will be united with God. And second this is where the obstacles are that separate me from God. These are “ignorance and heedlessness”.

He says,
I neither remember Him nor know Him. Why? Because He is hidden by my passions...My heart is closed by my own passions; that’s what it means. What happens now is that I begin to learn what passion is and how I am controlled them. My ignorance is exposed and I now know why I have been repeating the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner.” I now know what it means in the Psalm that says “cleanse and make me whiter that snow.” I now can see what is the extent of the cleansing needed to be united with God in prayer. Now I really know I need His mercy. Now what is necessary for life in the Kingdom of Heaven is clear. I now know what passions are and all of them that are in me. I understand the needed battle that needs to take place to cleanse my heart. I now know how much I need His help.
The Elder says that now is the time “for us to see if we’ll accept or reject Him.” He also reminds us that up to this time we have only been playing a game with God.  Now the real struggle begins and if we accept Him we have the Holy Spirit to help us.

What do we have to do? He says we must be wary of our egotism that we have been hiding behind, we must accept this sinfulness that has been revealed.
I have to shatter my being...just as you use a nut-cracker to smash a nut and it makes a “crack” and splits open and you pick up the pieces, that’s what I have to do to my heart! So I can get out the rubbish and throw it away, so I can discover that what I am, what I have loved, what I have desired, what I have asked for in my prayer so far, all that is what Saint Paul calls refuse and I am called on to deny it. To understand that it is refuse, so I can be filled with God. 
He says that if feel that I really need to know God and need to clean out all the “rubbish,”  and that I will not deny God for the sake of myself and accept the challenge to clean up the mess, then I will find the first tears flowing from my eyes.

He says,
In my pain, I begin to cry out again: “My God, my God”. Now I’m saying “Come, Holy Spirit and cleanse me of my sin. Heavenly King, Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, come and teach me in my ignorance, come abide in me, who am so bad, so full, and cleanse me of every stain. Take out whatever is inside me, so that you can come and dwell there”. Not I can say the prayer of the Spirit.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

What comes after Silence in Prayer?



Silence comes gradually in prayer. This is our first stage in seeking a union with God. It is this silence where you are able to hear more than your heart beat. It is in silence that God can speak to us. In silence we come to know our soul and the life giving spirit that dwells within.

Elder Aimilianos says,
 I have to learn to be silent, that is, I have to learn to listen, I have to learn to wait, to await the voice of God. Within this silence, I’ll then be able to hear the beat of my heart, not the beat of my bodily heart, but I’ll feel my life-giving-Spirit, my hypostasis, which is none other than the Holy Spirit.
It is in silence that we can come to know and experience the Holy Spirit, the uncreated energies of God. It is in this silence of prayer that we begin to desire to acquire the Holy Spirit. We want to know what is the real meaning of the Holy Spirit. What we need is a revelation, Elder Aimilianos tells us, so we can understand the true meaning of the Holy Trinity revealed to us in Scripture. This is an experience that he says comes gradually.

He says,
The experience comes gradually, progress within our soul and God takes up His place within our being. And His steps and His voice mingle with our steps and our voice and then we become one with God.
This is all part of a long process that comes from our love of God, Our humbleness, our patience seeking and endurance in prayer. Eventually we develop this true desire for the Holy Spirit.

The Elder says,
We begin to desire the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, so that at some stage we can say:”Come and abide in us, Holy Spirit, and cleanse us from all stain” because our souls are full of stains, they fill our souls and there is nothing we ourselves can do about it
We want to be pure in heart so we can see God as Jesus promised us. Not in some future life but in our life right now. It is only in this way that we can do with certainty the will of God. With a soul cleansed of all stain we know His will for us and can begin to act as a loyal servant.

This stage of desiring the Holy Spirit is only a temporary stage. Once we realize that is is the acquiring of the Holy Spirit that is essential for us we still have not acquired it.

The Elder tells us,
We feel this anxious expectation, then we’ll progress and we’ll have that silent delight which we call the foretaste of the coming of the Spirit and awareness of the presence of God.
To be in communion with God we need to call for Him, we need to seek, we need to knock on His door as Scripture says. Then in silence with great anticipation we, in our complete humility, we realize that without the Holy Spirit we cannot understand, we cannot be cured of our blindness or the satins that block us from God. The Elder tells we must say, “Spirit, where are you for goodness’ sake. You teach me!”

Now we must wait in anticipation feeling that He is nearby.

The Divine Liturgy is a Gift of the Holy Spirit


The Divine Liturgy is truly a gift of the Holy Spirit to humanity. It is an initiation into the mysteries of the Spirit, a mode of the revelation of God and of all things heavenly. There is nothing in the Liturgy which is not revelatory of the Godhead and of the energies of the Holy Trinity.

Because we know and believe that God is our Father, we view the church, especially when we celebrate the Liturgy, as our true home. We come in and go out freely, we are happy to be here, we make the sign of the cross, we light our candles, we speak with our friends, and it is easy to see that the Orthodox feel that the church is their home… The Liturgy is our family our gathering, our house. And what a spacious house it is! Together with us are those who are absent, along with sinners, and with the wicked, and the dead, indeed, even those who are in hell, but who may yet remember something about God….

So we come to church, to our true home, and we are truly glad. This is the greatest privilege which a Christian can have. Here we experience the grace of God. We experience our salvation, the results of the redemptive work of our God, of Christ, the great “High Priest.”… Christ lives for us, he prays for us, and raises his hands to the heavenly Father… He has not ceased to urge our saints — and particularly His Mother of God — to intercede for us to the heavenly Father, for our hearts, for our sins, for our pains, for the disappointments of our life…. So don’t think that when we go to church, we are simply entering and exiting an ordinary building. Instead, we go up to, and make our entrance into, the Holy of Holies, into the heavens themselves…

When we enter church, then, we are traversing the distance from church to heaven… We see the bread and wine, but who among us does not believe they are Christ? We inhale the fragrance of wine and bread, but who among us does not believe this to be the body and blood of he Savior?…This is a sacrament. This is what a “mystery” of the church means…

Our liturgy is an exceeding great gift. No one is worthy of such greatness. No one can do anything without God. He alone makes these magnificent blessings real, and places them in our hands and hearts.

…And for this we say: Thank you, Lord our God, because you have brought down the ranks of angels and raised us up to heaven. We are found worthy to stand before the heavenly Father. What blessedness! What happiness!

But let each of us ponder how great and rich God has made us; how highly he has exalted us, dispite the fact that we are sinners! “Woe is me,” said Isaiah the prophet, for God himself has descended upon me, and I am afraid I will die. And this is what we should also say when we come to church. We should be afraid, but we should also rejoice. We should tremble, but our hearts should also leap for joy, because we are embracing God, and God is embracing us.

So we have come to church, to the Liturgy! Let nothing disturb the tranquility of your soul. God is present. Wherever we look, God is before us! If we don’t see Him, this doesn’t mean He isn’t there, but only that our eyes are not used to seeing Him…

With the eyes of our mind, let us see the king for whom we sinners opened the way, and let us say with the Psalmist: “Come let us worship and fall down before Him and cry to the Lord… for He is our God.” (Ps 94.6-7) Let us open the depths of our hearts to the Lord, who is present here with us, and let us advance more each and every day, so that we will be able to discover everything that God, our redeemer, has done for us.

Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra
An address give in Larnaca, Cyprus, 23 October 1988

Found it The Church at Prayer p67-72