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Reflection For The Second Sunday of Lent (St Gregory Palamas Sunday)

Reflection For The Second Sunday of Lent (St Gregory Palamas Sunday)

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 8:10 am by Henry Karlson

Reflection For The Second Sunday of Lent (St Gregory Palamas Sunday) 2017-03-09T08:10:10-05:00 Henry Karlson

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God’s warning of death had been fulfilled. The soul continued to animate the body, but because of sin, the soul has lost itself in confusion, and so ended up bound and paralyzed by that body of sin. Indeed, instead of directing the body, the soul found itself trapped by the material wants and needs of the body, being directed by the bodies impulses, following them wherever they should lead, even if such impulses and desires counter the reasonable good the soul would otherwise suggest. Closed off from the light of God due to sin, the soul is bound to be led by the blindness of the body. Thus, St. Symeon the New Theologian preached:

Likewise the soul cannot live unless it is ineffably and without confusion united to God, who is truly the life eternal (cf. 1John 5:20). Before this union in knowledge, vision, and perception it is dead, even though it is endowed with intellect and is by nature immortal. There is no knowledge without vision, nor vision without knowledge. [3]

But Christ our God, the light of the world, has come to us, to rekindle in us the life which we lost, and bring with his grace the vision of God. At all times, Christ is willing to come to us, tell us our sins are forgiven, so that we can get up and walk in the spirit and know true life, as St. Symeon also declared:

But, if you will, let us look and carefully examine what is the mystery of that resurrection of Christ our God which takes place mystically in us at all times, if we are willing, and how Christ is buried in us as in a tomb and how He unites Himself to our souls and rises again, and raises us with Himself. [4]

We must remember, we are given our freedom from God. We are created by God to be actors in the world. It is in and through God, through his grace, working with it and cooperating with it, that true freedom is to be found. For as with us, so with all things: all things find their potential comes through God, who fills all things and gives them not only their existence, but their potency as well, as St. Gregory the Great wrote:

The power of the soul makes the body live and move. So, also, God’s power fills all His creatures. He gives life to some with His own breath; to others He gives animate or merely inanimate existence. [5]

And so, as we come alive, as we find our bondage from sin removed by Christ, we become temples of the living God. In this fashion, as St. Symeon pointed out, we receive all the good which we could ever desire:

Accordingly, as soon has he has attained this state, God dwells in him and becomes for him all that he desires, or, rather, more than he desires. For God who is all goodness fills the soul in which He dwells with all goodness (cf. Ps. 107:9) as for as our nature is capable of receiving it, because God is infinite and cannot be contained by any created nature.[6]

As Temples of God, we receive the light of God, a divine fire which comes and purifies us from all sin even as it enlightens our mind and leads it to the transcendent truth of God which is beyond our comprehension. The grace of God comes to us in our whole being, so that our body, united with our soul, is also to experience this grace and reveal the light of God in it when God entirely frees it from its spiritual paralysis:

Let no one deceive you! God is light (1 John 1:5), and to those who have entered union with Him He imparts of His own brightness to the extent that they have been purified. When the lamp of the soul, that is, the mind, has been kindled, then it knows that a divine fire has taken hold of it and inflamed it. How great a marvel! Man is united to God spiritually, and physically, since the soul is not separated from the mind, neither the body from the soul. [7]

St. Gregory Palamas by Lamprotes (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

All of this can be seen as a part of the foundation for what St. Gregory Palamas taught. Any and all saints will find themselves joined with the light of God, see it shining in them, in both their mind and their body, as they experience all truth and glory in the revelation of God. They know it is God in them and with them, and because of it, they will see and experience God, knowing God without comprehension. They will experience glory in the beauty of God, a beauty which can be nothing other than God. They will truly know God, knowing, however, what they know of God is far less than God is in himself – for God’s transcends their comprehension as it lies beyond the light which they are given:

The monks know that the essence of God transcends the fact of being inaccessible to the senses, since God is not only above all created things, but is even beyond Godhead. The excellence of Him Who surpasses all things is not only beyond all affirmation, but also beyond all negation; it exceeds all excellence that is attainable by the mind. This hypostatic light, seen spiritually by the saints, they know by experience to exist, as they tell us, and to exist not symbolically only, as do manifestations produced by fortuitous events; but it is an illumination immaterial and divine, a grace invisibly seen and ignorantly known. What it is, they do not pretend to know.[8]

What we can know and perceive of God’s actions, his energia, we can proclaim and try to explain at the best of our ability, but beyond that light we know and experience lies the truth of God which transcends us, who acts in ways we will never comprehend. In the presence of God, all fall short of God and find themselves silenced in awe: “Who can comprehend the hidden judgments of God? When His judgments are beyond our understanding, we should stand before them in awe rather than with a questioning mind.” [9]

[1] St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues. Trans. Odo John Zimmerman, OSB (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 189.

[2] St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, 189-90.

[3] St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses. Trans. George Maloney, SJ (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 183.

[4] St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses, 182.

[5] St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, 197.

[6] St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses, 190.

[7] St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses. 195.

[8] St Gregory Palamas, The Triads. Trans. Nicholas Gendle (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), 57.

[9] St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, 223.

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