“Jesus said unto his disciples: If ye love me, keep my
commandments” (Jn. 14:15).
Something to think about today is the cultivation of the spiritual life, more specifically the idea of 'purity of heart' which is near and dear to the Christian monastic tradition from its very beginnings. You cannot serve God without a measure of self-control, and you cannot attain self-mastery apart from the grace of God. It is something that the Fathers of the Church understood to be indispensable to the spiritual life. They were given to understand their own weaknesses in the light of Divine purity clearly enough that they fled to the desert, either temporarily or permanently, to do battle with their demons and free their hearts to give themselves entirely to God. One of the early masters, Evagrius Ponticus, describes for us the gift of fear of the Lord in the context of the desert: “The fear of God strengthens faith, my son, and continence in turn strengthens this fear. Patience and hope make this latter virtue solid beyond all shaking and they also give birth to apatheia.”
The Greek term apatheia, or purity of heart, can be
understood to include both moral and spiritual self-control. It is a
virtue as well as a way of being and it is inseparable from the
instruction in the Gospel to keep the commandments of God. As
the desert Fathers were in it for the long haul, so are we. But
instead of exposure to the harsh reality of the desert, our demons
have many places to hide and disguise themselves in our bustle of
activity. That is where the grace of the Holy Ghost is all the more
necessary to us. In some ways, those of us 'in the world' face a much
steeper climb on the road that is apatheia than
those who have embraced the monastic life. Another take on
this idea can be found in a sermon of Pope Gregory the Great, who
offers us a helpful metaphor as well:
Whosoever abandoneth himself to unlawful desires, such an one
plainly loveth not God, for thereby he setteth himself against God's
good pleasure. Note the words: And my Father will love him, and we
will come unto him, and make our abode with him. Think, dearly
beloved brethren, what a dignity it is, to have God abiding as a
guest in our hearts. Surely if some rich man, or some powerful
friend, were to come into our house, we would hasten to have the
whole house cleaned, lest perchance when he came in, he should see
aught to displease his eye. So let him that would make ready his
soul as an abode for God, cleanse it from all the filth of evil
works. (St. Gregory the Great, Homily 30 on the Gospel
of St. John).
By the time we mature to the point of actively cultivating apatheia
in our conversion, we are then able to make a true beginning in the
spiritual life, as the desert fathers understood it. Everything that
came before was simply by way of preparation, or house cleaning if
you like. We may in fact spend a lifetime in the preparatory
phases, but that’s okay. God is always generous enough to take us
where we are at, and not where we (or others) might think we should
be, and He knows that not all are able or intended to reach the
heights of contemplation. And...we should depend on the grace of the Holy Spirit
received at our baptism and confirmation. We can depend
on it, always.
Let me follow this up with another quotation, this time from John
Henry Newman:
Let us but consider how we have fallen from the light and grace of
our Baptism. Were we now what that Holy Sacrament made us, we might
ever 'go on our way rejoicing;' but having sullied our heavenly
garments, in one way or other, in a greater or less degree (God
knoweth and our own consciences too in a measure), alas! the Spirit
of adoption has in part receded from us, and the sense of guilt,
remorse, sorrow, and penitence must take His place. We must renew
our confession, and seek afresh our absolution day by day, before we
dare call upon God as 'our Father,' or offer up Psalms and
Intercessions to Him. And, whatever pain and affliction meets us
through life, we must take it as a merciful penance imposed by a
Father upon erring children, to be borne meekly and thankfully, and
as intended to remind us of the weight of that infinitely greater
punishment, which was our desert by nature, and which Christ bore
for us on the Cross (Newman, The Indwelling Spirit,
sermon 19).
So, the quest for
purity of heart, apatheia, is not a one-time deal. Neither is
it always easy. But, we have been given all the resources that we
need. God is not outdone in generosity, we see that time and again,
cogently in the story of the first Christian Pentecost that was read
in the Epistle this morning. This past week, in the course of
receiving some spiritual direction, I was told that people often
don't realise just how good and generous God is to us. As we read in
the alternate Gospel given in the Prayer Book for today: “If ye
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how
much more shall your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to them
that ask him?”
“Jesus said unto
his disciples: If ye love me, keep my commandments.”
