Engaging in True Prayer: Guidance from Saint Porphyrios

When Saint Porphyrios advises, "let the Lord himself teach us to pray. Don’t try to learn it on our own," he emphasizes that true prayer is a gift from God and should be guided by Him. It is not merely a technique or a set of words to be learned but a relational and spiritual practice that deepens through God's grace. Acknowledging that we cannot perfect our prayer life solely through our efforts requires humility and openness to the Holy Spirit's guidance.

We must remember that prayer is about a personal relationship with God. Allowing the Lord to teach us means engaging in a dynamic and responsive relationship where God leads and we follow. Saint Porphyrios underscores the importance of seeking God’s direct instruction and inspiration in the journey of prayer.

Saint Porphyrios also advises us to "make entreaty to receive the divine light of divine knowledge." This divine light refers to the spiritual insight and understanding that comes from God, allowing one to perceive and comprehend spiritual truths more deeply. By asking for this light, a person opens themselves to the transformative grace of God, which enlightens the mind and heart, leading to a more profound and genuine relationship with Him. It is a call to humble oneself and recognize the need for God's guidance and wisdom in one's spiritual journey.

This divine light he refers to is the same divine light mentioned by Saint Symeon the New Theologian, who often spoke about the experience of the divine light as a tangible encounter with God’s uncreated energies. He described it as an overwhelming, transformative experience that brings profound spiritual enlightenment and union with God.

This divine light is understood in Orthodox theology as the uncreated energy of God, through which believers can experience His presence and grace. Both saints emphasize the importance of seeking this light through prayer, humility, and a deep commitment to living a holy life, as it is through this light that one comes to a true knowledge of God and is transformed in His likeness.

Saint Porphyrios, in his unassuming way, shows the path of humility and calls us to a prayer life that is mystical, opening ourselves to the uncreated energies of God. When we experience these in the form of light, we are experiencing true prayer and a direct relationship with God. This should be our aim in prayer.

Reference: Wounded by by Love, Saint Porphyrios, pg 114

THE DIVINE ENERGIES

One of the most important aspects of Orthodox spirituality is participation in thedivine energies. Briefly stated, this is an Orthodox doctrine of fundamental importance and very often ignored. In Orthodox theology, a distinction is made between the "essence" and "energies" of God. Those who attain perfection do so by uniting with the divine uncreated energies, and not with the divineessence. The Greek Orthodox Fathers, whenever they speak of God, emphasize the unknowability of God's essence and stress the vision of thedivine energies, especially the divine uncreated Light. Orthodox spiritual tradition emphasizes the divine Logos indwelling in the world and our ability to attain a spiritual life and mystical union with the Holy Spirit in this world.

Christian contemplation is not "ecstatic," that is, outside ourselves, but it takes place within the Christian person who is the "temple of the Holy Spirit." Thedivine energies are "within everything and outside everything." All creation is the manifestation of God's energies. Vladimir Lossky says in the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church: "These divine rays penetrate the whole created universe and are the cause of its existence." The uncreated Light and the knowledge of God in Orthodox tradition "illuminates every man that cometh into this world." It is the same light that the apostles saw on Mount Tabor that penetrates all of creation and transforms it, creating it anew. A modern ascetic says in the Undistorted Image: "Uncreated Light is divine energy. Contemplation of Uncreated Light begets, first and foremost, an all absorbing feeling of the living God - an immaterial feeling of the immaterial, an intuitive, not a rational perception - which transports man with irrestible force into another world, but so warily that he neither realizes when it happens nor knows whether he is in or out of the body." This is not a sentimental or emotional feeling or romantic fantasy. It is experience of the divine uncreated Light described by the neptic Fathers. Again, in the words of the same ascetic: "This supramental sensation of the Living God (which is experienced in contemplation) is accompanied by a vision of light, of light essentially different from physical light. Man himself abides in light because, assimilated to the Light which he contemplates, and spiritualized by it, he then neither sees nor feels his own material being or the materiality of the world."

ILLUMINATION
God's act is pure light, and when the Lord appears to us, he always appears asLight. In Holy Scripture we read: "In Your Light we shall see light." Only in the state of illumination does divine grace makes possible the contemplation of thedivine light. The hidden truths of Holy Scripture are not revealed to everyone, since illumination comes through the special divine gift of revelation. For this reason in the early Church, the holy Bible was read only in the Church and only by a charismatic person. In the Orthodox Church, we have never experienced "bibliolatry" or "worship of the Book," as in some sects. The Church holds fast to the unadulterated spirit of the Bible as it was delivered to the Saints, and through them, to us.

taken from AN INTRODUCTION TO ORTHODOX SPIRITUALITY by
George C. Papademetriou

Perfection: The Divine LIght

The one who has purified himself of the passions and has reached a burning love for God on the steps of the virtues can attain the vision of the divine light...

The attainment fo the divine light indicates that one's nature has been spiritualized, perfected, so that it is a clear receptacle of the warmth and a light of the love of God. There are no traces of ego-centeredness left.  The Holy Spirit shines from within, enlightening one's presence.

Father Dimitru tells us that St. Simeon the New Theologian... and Gregory Palamas have described these three elements;

a) The light is a manifestation of love

b) This love is the work of the Holy Spirit

c) He that raises himself to this state of light or of culminating love forgets bodily sensation, produced by the world through the body, and even himself.

He says,

The intesity of this love, the blinding level of light with which it overflows, makes the body of the one who expereinces it totally transparent for others...

The bodily sense are overwhelmed.  Fr. Dimitru writes,

The body and the world are not done away with but they become the medium by which the interior light is made known.  A paradoxical thing happens.  First, the exterior things are overwhelmed; secondly, a great love is poured out through them, to everybody.  Light radiates from everything.

Saint Gregory Palamas says,

This is union: that all these things be one, that the person who sees no longer be able to distinguish between himself and that through which he is seeing, but he only knows this much: That it is light and he sees a light, distinct from all creatures.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 358 - 361

Perfection: The Mind and the Divine Light

What is the Divine Light?

Fr. Dimitru Staniloae says,

It is, from one point of view, simply the happy radiation of divine love, experienced in a more intensive form in moments of ecstatic focus on God.

The experience which characterizes this state could be expressed by three terms: love, a knowledge by experience, higher than conceptual; and the light which is the expression of joy.

To attain this state is a journey.  The mind finds itself through prayer.  When the passions have been overcome and the mind is still, there is a descent of divine love which is often experienced as uncreated light.  There is an ascent through purification and illumination and then the divine descent for our purification.


Saint Gregory Palamas describes it as follows:

The one who desires union with God... frees his soul as much as possible from every impure tie, and dedicates his mind to unceasing prayer to God, and by this becomes wholly himself; he finds a new and secret ascent to the heavens, an unapproachable ascent to the silence of the initiate, as someone might say. With an unspeakable pleasure, he submerges his mind in this deep night full of pure, full, and sweet quietness, of a true tranquility and silence and he is lifted up above all creatures.  In this way, he completely goes out of himself and becomes wholly of God; he sees a divine light inaccessible to the senses as such, but precious and holy to pure souls and minds; without this vision the mind couldn't see by being united with things above it, only by its mental sense, just as the body's eye can't see without perceptible light.

In the divine light the mind is enabled to see God directly and to find itself in union with Him.  This is not a light which is beyond itself or higher,


Gregory Palamas again,

But seeing itself, it sees more than itself: it does not simply contemplate some other object, or simply its own image, but rather the glory impressed on its own image by the grace of God.  This radiance reinforces the mind's power to transcend itself, and to accomplish that union with those better things which is beyond  understanding.  By this union, the mind sees God in the Spirit in a manner transcending human powers.

Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 327 - 336 

Watchfulness and The Divine Light - Beware of Delusion

Watchfulness involves lifting our thoughts to the spirit through our ability to observe them without being moved to any action.  This spirit within us is seen as the true way of knowing and the only faculty to know God.

Jesus says, "The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness." (Matt 6:22-23)

What is the meaning of the passage? He is saying that this spirit is also light.  When have clear sight we can see, and when we can see, our whole being is filled with light.

In His Life is Mine, Archimandrite Sophrony describes his experience with the light of spirit and gives us some cautions.  He writes, "The world of mental contemplation is essentially a radiant one.  Our mind is created in the image and after the Primal Mind––God.  Light is natural to it since it was made in the image of Him Who is Light unoriginate." (p 155)

Hieromonk Damascene points out that we need to be careful when we think of this light.  He sys, "This is where many who have practiced watchfulness have fallen into delusion over the centuries."  The key in his view is having purity of intention when we enter within.  If our intention is to be spiritual we are in great danger.  On the other hand if it is to deal with our shortcomings so we can perfect ourselves to follow more closely the commandments of God, then we are on safe ground.  If through our own effort we come onto the experience of this inner light of spirit we will continue to worship ourselves and worse, think we are in fact God.

Achimandrite Sophrony had this experience in his spiritual journey where he was involved with various forms of eastern meditation.  He writes,

"Attaining the bounds where day and night come to an end, man contemplates the beauty of his own spirit which many identify with Divine Being.  They do see a light but it is not the True Light in which there is no darkness at all.  It is the natural light peculiar to the mind of man created in God's image.

The mental light, which excels every other light of empirical knowledge, might still just as well be called darkness, since it is the darkness of divesture and God is not in it.  And perhaps in this instance more than any other we should listen to the Lord's warning, 'Take heed therefore that the light which is within you be not darkness.'"

To avoid this danger, absolute humility is necessary.  Fr.Sophrony writes,

"Since those who enter for the first time into the sphere of the silence of the mind experience a certain mystic awe, they mistake their contemplation for mystical communion with the Divine, whereas, in reality, they are still within the confines of created human nature.  The mind, it is true, here passes beyond the frontiers of time and space, and it is this that gives it a sense of grasping eternal wisdom.  This is a far as human intelligence can go along the path of natural development and self-contemplation...

"Dwelling in the darkness of divestiture, the mind knows a peculiar delight and sense of peace... Clearing the frontiers of time, such contemplation approaches the mind to knowledge of the in-transitory, thereby possessing man of new but abstract cognition.  Woe to him who mistakes this wisdom for the knowledge of the true God, and this contemplation for a communion in Divine Being.  Woe to him because the darkness of divestiture on the borders of true vision becomes an impenetrable pass and a stronger barrier between himself and God than the darkness due to the uprising of gross passion, or the darkness of obviously demonic instigations, or the darkness which results from loss of grace and abandonment by God.  Woe to him, for he will have gone astray and fallen into delusion." (pp 155-56) 

He tells us that the experience the Uncreated Light of the Divinity is given to us only by special action of God.  To go beyond the limits of mind and receive this gift, demands humility.  We must not seek a spiritual light, silence or peace when we practice watchfulness.  We seek silence in our mind so we can hear the direction that God is giving to us. Gods voice is still and small. (1Kings 19:12)  We can only hear and discern what he is telling us by lifting ourselves above the distraction of random thoughts that are continually invading our mind.  Jesus says, "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." (John 18:37)

We must remember His important words, "Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he who does the will of my Father Who is in heaven.  Many will say to me in that day, "Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied your name, cast out demons in your name, and done many wonderful works in Your name?" And then I will declare to them, "I never knew you: depart from me, you who work iniquity." (Matt 7:21-23)  What he is really saying here is that YOU did know Him when He says "I never knew you." Hieromonk Damascene says, "In effect he is saying, "You andI never developed a relationship because you were always listening to your thoughts, emotions and desires rather than to me.  You did not learn to distinguish my wordless voice from all the other voices in your head."

This is the aim of watchfulness and silence of the mind.  We seek God's voice directing us.  We develop the virtue of discernment.  We find ourselves in relationship with HIm, and unite our will to His.  Yes, we may experience the light of the mind and if it be God's will we may also experience His Uncreated Light.  We need to be careful not make the aim this light as we will be deluded and risk making ourselves God.

Message: Keep your intentions pure!

See The Tao of Christ pages 326-331