Symeon the New Theologian - calling the Holy Spirit a treasure.

Ann Persson is the author of The Circle of Love:  Praying with Rublev's Icon of the Trinity -see below. 

Night Office, Patristic Lectionary,  Augustine Press 1999

Seventh Week in Ordinary Time Year II Thursday

First Reading

2 Corinthians 4:5-18  

 Responsory     2 Cor 4:6; Dt 5:24

God has said: Let light shine out of darkness. + He has shone in our hearts that we might make known the glory of God shining on the face of Christ Jesus.

V. The Lord our God has shown us his glory and greatness, and we have heard his voice. + He has shone...

Second Reading

From a treatise by Saint Symeon the New Theologian (Traites Theologiques et Ethiques J, 10: se 122, 252-254)

We receive the Word of God in our hearts - calling the Holy Spirit a treasure

Everyone of us believes in him who is the Son of God and son of Mary, ever-virgin and mother of God. And as believers we faithfully welcome his gospel into our hearts, confessing in words our belief, and repenting with all our soul of our past sins. Then immediately, just as God the Word of the Father entered the Virgin's womb, so also in ourselves the word which we receive in learning right belief appears like a seed. You should be amazed when you hear of such an awe-inspiring mystery, and because the word is reliable you should receive it with full conviction and faith.

In fact we receive him not bodily, as the Virgin and Mother of God received him, but both spiritually and substantially. And the very one whom the chaste Virgin also received, we hold in our own hearts, as Saint Paul says: It is God, who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shown in our hearts to reveal the knowledge of his Son. In other words: he has become wholly substantial in us. And that he actually meant this, he made clear in the next verse: But we contain this treasure in earthenware pots, calling the Holy Spirit a treasure. But elsewhere he also calls the Lord Spirit: The Lord is the Spirit, he says. And he tells us this so that if you hear the words the Son of God, you should think of and hear the words the Spirit at the same time. Again, if you hear the Spirit mentioned you should join the Father to the Spirit in thought, because con­cerning the Father too it is said: God is Spirit. You are constantly taught that the Holy Trinity is inseparable and of the same substance, and that where the Son is the Father is also, and where the Father is the Spirit is also, and where the Holy Spirit is the whole of the deity in three persons is, the one God and Father with Son and Spirit of the same substance, "who is praised for ever. Amen."

So if we wholeheartedly believe and ardently repent, we receive the Word of God in our hearts, as has been said, like the Virgin, if of course we bring with us our own souls chaste and pure. And just as the fire of the deity did not consume the Virgin since she was supremely pure, so neither does it consume us if we bring with us chaste and pure hearts; on the contrary it becomes in us the dew from heaven, a spring of water, and a stream of immortal life.

  

Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), born in Galata in Paphlagonia, Symeon was educated in Constantinople, where in 977 he entered the famous monastery of Studios. Soon afterward he transferred to the nearby monastery of Saint Mamas, was ordained priest in 980, and about three years later became abbot. During his twenty-five years of office he instilled a new fervor into his community, but opposition to his teaching forced him to resign in 1005 and in 1009 he was exiled to Palonkiton on the other side of the Bosphorus. He turned the ruined oratory of Saint Marina into another monastery, and although he was soon pardoned, chose to remain there until his death rather than compromise his teaching. The greatest of Byzantine mystical writers, Symeon combined the contemplative tradition of Mount Sinai with the cenobitic tradition of Saint Basil and Saint Theodore of Studios. Symeon was much influenced by the homilies attributed to Macarius of Egypt, and taught that mystical experience of God is a normal part of a truly Christian life. For him this meant having a personal relationship with Christ dwelling in us through the Spirit. Symeon is called the "new" theologian to distinguish him from Saint Gregory Nazianzen, who has the title of "the theologian."

Ann Persson is the author of The Circle of Love: 

Praying with Rublev's Icon of the Trinity 

We can trust the Holy Spirit to lead us into worship, not of the icon but of the Godhead that it portrays.

Although the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are of one essence, nevertheless there are individual distinctions, and Rublev makes that wonderfully plain to see.

God the Holy Spirit

We will start following the movement around the circle with the figure on the right, the Holy Spirit. He is the one who leads us in and interprets the life of God to us. He is dressed in a blue tunic with a gorgeous light-green mantle, probably painted in terre verte pigment, otherwise known as 'green earth'. Green is the liturgical colour of Pentecost in the Orthodox Church and the symbolic colour of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, who breathes life, wears colours that speak of creation. Blue reminds us of sky and water; green speaks of vegetation. All living things owe their freshness to his touch. 

...

His is the only stave that is seen in its full length, as if it is pointing towards earth. His hand gives the impression of not only blessing the cup of sacrifice but also of indicating downwards, for he is the one who breathes the life of God into us. His action is to transform us and it is through him that we are invited to experience new life in Christ.

Above the Spirit is a mountain. Maybe the mountain represents faith, a gift of the Holy Spirit or the meeting places where God revealed his glory, such as Mount Sinai, where he appeared to Moses, or the mount of transfiguration, where Jesus was seen in glory by three of his disciples.

As the icon is based on the story of Abraham, however, perhaps the mountain represents Mount Moriah, on which Isaac, the promised son in the story, would be offered for sacrifice–Abraham's response to a test that God devised to prove his faith. The story is recorded in Genesis 22 and it is a foreshadowing of the greater story of the triune God's self-sacrificing love in the giving of the Son to be our Saviour.

The curvature of the body and the bowed head of the figure on the right draw us into the circle and lead us towards the central figure, whom I have taken to be Christ the Son. The Spirit does not let us stay with himself. His work is to reveal God the Father through God the Son.

Fr. Edward - "God himself praised himself, and because he could well praise himself, man therefore learned how he could praise him.”

Sacristan - Altar flowers.

Dear Fr. Edward, 
Thank you for your Email "Subject: Some more lines."
At Vespers the first  Psalm was from “Exaltabo te. Deus meus Rex” (Psalm 144)    
And hence our astonishment from your "lines of contemplation".

In our background back home
It was the day of the Garvald Village FLOWER SHOW.
The weather was of dense fog, the worst known in early morning.
The Abbot attended.
Later, some of the benefits from the Show added to the tea time of the monks.
Of most interest to the Sacristan was the bouquet of PRIZE ROSES from good friend Dorothy. 
Some pictures fill up wheels turning in our hearts.
In Dno.
Donald

+ + +

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: edward b...
To: Donald ... 
Sent: Saturday, 25 August 2012, 15:39
Subject: Some more lines

Dear Father Donald,

I do not know whether this will interest you at all. 

I was   very struck with the idea of God praising God!

What insight! 

What purity of soul to perceive this! 

And please a copy for H ...

Blessings  in Domino

fr Edward O.P.

“Exaltabo te. Deus meus Rex” (Psalm 144)

Like a privileged man fresh from the experience

of being elevated, concentrated, purged,

into a contemplation of exceptional intensity

and transforming purity,

Augustine begins his sermon

with a power to convince without effort or questioning

his congregation:

“I have dared to praise the Lord with you;”

he finds in himself the urge to concentrate his spirit

in all his hearers in the sure trust

that his received fire will communicate itself to them.

So experiencing in the act of communicating it

he offers it with a safeguard:

“and since [the Lord] deigns to concede this

so that the praise which we are going to offer him

might have an ordering

lest there be something offensive to the one who praises,

it is better that we seek a way of praising

from the Scriptures of God

so that we do not stray from the path

to the right or left.

For I have the boldness to say to your collective charity,

so that God may be appropriately praised by man

God himself praised himself,

and because he could well praise himself,

man therefore learned how he could praise him.”

This passage I learned from the opening of an Apostolic Constitution

of Pope Saint Pius X.    

The quotation was among others equally authoritative, offering encouragement,

from the beginning of his Apostolic Constitution, Divino Afflatu, of 1911.

This was the true divine wisdom of the Pope acknowledged in his Collect.

It raises him from the secular encirclement of the Vatican

left by Garibaldi and Cavour.

from the disappointment of others at his election Conclave,

from the tiresomeness of irrelevant “modernism”

which time's progress soon ages

with its pressure of pastness,

from the march to Europe's brutal “civil war” of three years later.

A part of a group of gestures to give the Church a higher and purer worship

aligned with the profundity and reach of the Fathers

and later theologians.

A gesture of profound defiance aimed at the Godlessness

of the revolution begun in France

ending in the tyranny of Napoleon,

backed up by deceptive, never universally defined reason:

too prone to use the argument of bloodshed charged with envy.

These words can be applied at two depth-levels.

The first insight, deep-rooted in Christian culture, of the union in the Triune God

of the total and equal praise of

equal totally self-communicating Persons

offered to and from each,

timelessly, spacelessly,

beyond space-time,

where no relational opposition reigns.

An eternal lynch-pin where creation's all is

contained by a timeless, spaceless

self-balance of totality in a unity-totality

as one in se,

if distinguishable within this unity-totality

by Personal proceedings, yet all-containing and self-containing in identity;

participated by the angelic spirits as invisible and powerful,

as also by material's lower status, its equivalence with electro-magnetic energy

established a hundred years ago,

before atomic and sub-atomic force-bearers were located and identified.

In this space-time worship persists, when man can embrace the appearance

of configurations of matter-energy,

what his spirit demands – its guarantee of order, no matter what the depth.

His presence to self-praise and in self-praise of God

cannot be rejected by an act of human will;

it retains the cosmic all in a totality of changing equilibrium.

Essential stability and serial instances:

the former measured by self-authenticating theophany: 

Nature's highest because divine which shows itself in worship-cultus as realest, prompting the human mind to rise in humility and always to return.

Self-knowing is not high enough, nor tight enough to satisfy the capacity of man.

Self-praise in the divine alone is great enough and pure enough.

Not the all.

But what contains the all –

as one great timelessness and spacelessness.

Why do we resist what's most natural?

Stykkishólmur

21 August 2012

von Balthasar

MONDAY 19^th July 2010

MEDITATION OF THE DAY (MAGNIFICAT Missalette)

Father von Balthasar

Seeking a Sign

An "experience" is necessary if one is to open up to faith ... The disciples too desired a sign so that they could orient themselves toward Christ's return ... The sign of Jesus' resurrection is his death. Precisely in this apparent contradiction the faith Jesus demands gives proof of its victory over the world. What sign did Jonah make when he proclaimed to Nineveh her own destruction? Certainly no miraculous vision. Yet there must have been an incomprehensible power in his preaching if the whole city, including its king, believed him. It must have been the character of his word, embedded in the word itself yet reaching out beyond it to the hearts of his hearers. All that this reaching out required was that they not shut themselves up against the power and character of the word.

"No other sign," Jesus says. It is as if he thereby sweeps away all his healings and exorcisms, all his multiplication of loaves and calming of storms, as if all these "works" were invalid as signs, as if in the ultimate decision he was confining himself to himself, who surpasses Jonah in signification. He transcends Jonah's sign through the insignificance ("even to death on the cross") of his three days spent hidden in the bosom of the earth. Those demanding a sign receive nothing but the character of the (incarnate Divine) Word in its mundane, humiliated form. This, and only this, is believable - every ostentatious sign would be incredible 'and would point only to a power opposed to God (Rv 13: 3-4, 13-15).

That Jonah was spit out onto the dry ground on the third day, that Christ arose on the third day, is not given as a sign to "this evil generation." Unlike the healing of the mortally wounded beast in Revelation, the .resurrection is no spectacle upon which belief focuses. Nowhere is it called a "sign," and Thomas was explicitly instructed: "Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe" Un 20: 29). The witness must be believed; just as Jonah testified to his mission from God, so Jesus is the testimony of the Father, and the disciples are Christ's witnesses (Acts 13: 31; 10: 41). They will have both cross and resurrection to bear witness to, but the cross is the visible sign, and the resurrection is the invisible sign. The cross shows itself as a defeat; the resurrection victory is invisible.

Therefore, Christ's Church shows herself to the world as a sign of humiliation, persecution, and death.

FATHER HANS URS VON BALTHASAR (+ 1988) was an eminent Swiss Catholic theologian who wrote prodigiously.
from You Have Words of Eternal Life, Scripture Meditations,
Dermis Martin. Tr. © 1999. Ignatius Press, San Francisco. CA.