For Whitsunday

“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.”