| What is Spiritual Vision? Unfortunately, many people who go to church – and not just for five, ten, or twenty years, but for forty or fifty – remain in a state of complete spiritual blindness. Why, you might ask? Someone goes to Confession, venerates the icons, and receives the Holy Mysteries of Christ. Why does he still remain blind? The kontakion for the service of the Sunday of the Blind Man reads: “Being blinded in the eyes of my soul, O Savior, I come unto Thee, O Christ, as did the man who was born blind. And in repentance I cry to Thee: Of those in darkness art Thou the most radiant light.” An entire Sunday is dedicated to the celebration of this event from Gospel history, since it is of enormous spiritual significance. In connection with this, it will be quite opportune for us to talk about what spiritual blindness is and where it comes from, as well as what the eyes of the soul are, why they do not see anything, and what they should in fact see. The exapostilarion states: “Do Thou, O Lord, enlighten my noetic eyes, blinded by the gloom of sin; and instill in me humility, O Compassionate One, cleansing me by tears of repentance.” “Noetic eyes” is a spiritual notion. Our soul differs from the soul of an animal in that it possesses immortality; the mark of this immortality is reason. The soul is reasonable and, therefore, its senses are also reasonable: it has noetic eyes and noetic ears. But they have been darkened by sin. Therefore, when we are born – and we are born into sin from sinful parents – our souls cannot see. Our souls are blind from birth. “Being blinded in the eyes of my soul, O Savior, I come unto Thee, O Christ.” Our souls have lost the ability to see God. Therefore, only “tears of repentance” can cleanse the eyes of the soul. With what does this spiritual vision begin? One person, for instance, says that he sees the future; another sees the past; a third sees certain “auras”; a fourth sees angels; and a fifth sees prophetic dreams. Is this spiritual vision? No, not by any means. Spiritual vision means seeing the truth. |
| Скачать epub pdf Bartimaeus 13 January 1991 In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. As in the days of the ministry of Christ on earth, Saint John the Baptist had been preaching the Gospel of repentance, the good news that repentance, turning to God, always brings us face to face with Him in reconciliation, so does also the Church now, before Lent face us with weeks of preparation, weeks during which we look at ourselves as deeply as we can, as honestly as we can, before we are confronted with deeds of God, with His power and with the example of those who had truly turned away from evil, given themselves to God, and have found (?) fulfilment and salvation. And before these weeks begin to prepare us even to this, we remember, as we do today, Bartimaeus, the blind man of Jericho, a reminder that we all are blind, that we all have forgotten how to see the reality of things. He was blinded by illness; we are blinded by the visible; the invisible becomes invisible to us because all that catches our eye prevents us from looking deep, looking into the depth. The message which is brought to us today is this: we are all blind, and we must learn to see; to see ourselves as we are, both what is evil, imperfect, distorted to us, and also, deep to us, the beauty of the image of God which nothing can erase, nothing can destroy, which may be covered up as an icon may be covered up by dust, but which remain glorious within us. And we must learn to look at ourselves, and discern both good and evil: not only evil, but also t h a t good which can inspire us to struggle, to fight, and to overcome all that is unworthy of God. But we must also learn in these weeks to look at everyone around us and see God’s image in him or in her, forget those imperfections which blind us to the beauty of every person, look deep into each one who is our neighbour, and worshipfully, reverently discover the divine presence, the divine likeness in him or in her. Only then we will be able to move on to the weeks of preparation which will confront us one after the other with our most common and most destructive imperfections. If we (?) to look at ourselves, we often do not (feel) that we have eyes to see, we have no terms of reference: how can we see? There is mirror in which we can see both good and evil; let us, in the course of these days read with an open mind, and open heart, with veneration the Gospel. We will see in Christ what a true human being is; we will see in His teaching what we are called to be and to become; we will see in Him, in His apostles, in those who surrounded Him this struggle for perfection, let us look into the Gospel as one looks into a mirror, compare ourselves with what we see, and we w i l l then discover not only evil but glory; and let us, inspired by it, move on, as Paul says, from glory to glory, turning away from past and rushing towards the fulfilment of our vocation. Amen. |
| Image source: Twitter/Kevin Lewis Dramatic video has emerged of a blind man being hauled to safety after falling onto train tracks. The footage, which was captured at the Metro red line Medical Center station in Bethesda, Maryland, shows a blind man tumbling onto the tracks just before train headlights can be seen hurtling around the bend. Realizing the seriousness of the situation and the imperative to act quickly, a group of bystanders springs into action, throwing themselves onto the track to help the stricken man. As one man approaches to help, another woman can be seen sprinting off down the platform, presumably to warn the oncoming train to hit the brakes. Others then rush over to help, eventually dragging the man to safety. “I saw the headlights of the train. I said, ‘quickly!’” the heroic rescuer, Brendan Crawley, told WJLA-TV’s Kevin Lewis. “We all were able to pull him up just as the train was arriving.” EXCLUSIVE: Good Samaritans rescue a visually impaired man who fell onto the tracks at the Medical Center Metro Station in Bethesda, Md. “I saw the headlights of the train. I said, ‘quickly!’ We all were able to pull him up just as the train was arriving,” Brendan Cawley told me. Following the near miss, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority announced that the man had been taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, including “shortness of breath” and a “pain in his arm.” As for Crawley, he’s still haunted by what might have happened had he not been standing close by when the man fell. “I have thought a little bit about if I wasn’t there, and to be honest, I’m not exactly sure how the outcome would have been,” he noted . “I’m just glad I was.” God bless these quick thinkers for taking action and saving this man’s life! Code for blog Since you are here… …we do have a small request. More and more people visit Orthodoxy and the World website. However, resources for editorial are scarce. In comparison to some mass media, we do not make paid subscription. It is our deepest belief that preaching Christ for money is wrong. |
| Sermon on the Sunday of Zacchaeus The story of Zacchaeus concerns precisely this. In our daily church life we almost do not distinguish between Confession and repentance. But the Savior did not speak with Zacchaeus one on one; He did not cover him with the epitrachil [stole]; He did not read any prayer of absolution over him. It was not Confession, but repentance did occur. And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. And, behold, there was a rich man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who He was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And He ran before, and climbed up into a sycomore tree to see Him; for He was to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up, and saw Him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house. And he made haste, and came down, and received Him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, That He was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, This day is salvation come to this house, forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which is lost (Luke 19:1-10). The reading about Zacchaeus in the Gospel according to Luke immediately follows the story of the healing of the blind man that was heard last Sunday. Yet between these fragments lies a liturgical watershed: while the reading for the thirty-first Sunday after Pentecost (the story of the blind man of Jericho) in fact depends on the day of last year’s Pentecost and Pascha, the reading about Zacchaeus, although assigned to the thirty-second Sunday after Pentecost, is in fact connected not with the last Pascha, but with the coming one. In other words, when we hear the story of Zacchaeus in church it means that Great Lent begins in four weeks. |
| Sunday of the Blind Man. There is no salvation without good character. There is no salvation without courage. Fr. Seraphim Holland In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Brothers and sisters, during this Paschal season the Gospels have taught about enlightenment and the process of salvation. Today’s Gospel is another example, and it speaks of something indispensible that we must supply, the same thing that was present in Saint Thomas and the Myrrhbearing women: Character. You cannot be saved without good character. You need it to follow the commandments. It has to be in the heart. This blind man was a good man. We can see his character very vividly when the Jews questioned him about his healing. We observe a man who really knew nothing about Christ except his name, who on the greatest day of his life was being accosted, questioned and attacked with hostility, even from his own parents. He showed great purity and honesty and courage and not a little bit of humor as well. We need to have character if we’re going to be saved, and this man shows the kind of character we must have. This man’s character overcame the obstacles newly presented in his life, because of the disingenuous and aggressive questioning of the Pharisees and Sadducees after his healing. They are much like the “press”, the mob of people who surrounded the house and made access to Christ difficult for the Paralytic. The paralytic was lowered through a roof because of the press, and symbolically this means that the world makes it difficult to be a true believer. The world tries to impede us, and this is exactly what’s happening here. The Pharisees, because of their jealousy, blindness, anger and hatefulness, were trying to find something to condemn Christ because he was merciful to one of their own. Remember, the Pharisees controlled many things. If you were put out of the synagogue, then you were basically blacklisted. It would mean bad things for your well-being, your business contacts, and everything else. The Pharisees had made it be known that they were extorting from their own people obedience to them, and they had forbidden that anyone could say that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah), otherwise they would be put out of the synagogue. |
| The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to St. John. (9:1-38) Duccio di Buoninsegna - Healing of the Blind Man (fragment). In today’s gospel passage we hear so much about blindness and the miracle of the Lord to restore a man’s vision, his physical sight. As we have witnessed in many stories of the gospel, as we go through the passage we begin to understand that things are not quite what they seem. We learn over the course of the reading that the true problem isn’t the lack of physical sight of the blind man, but rather the lack of spiritual sight of the Pharisees. Spiritual blindness is more significant than physical blindness. I should be quite content to be physically blind as long as my heart and soul are not blinded as well. What does spiritual blindness look like? It starts with each of us and our understanding of ourselves. St. John of Kronstadt said “Every man on earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin and is overcome with its fury.” So this blindness is caused by and is a direct result of sin. And it is coupled with pride. Pride justifies our behaviors and our failings to others and to ourselves instead of admitting that we struggle and fail and are in desperate need of God’s mercy and healing. We begin the process of healing and of receiving our sight when we counteract our pride with the virtue of humility. This process begins when we can confess our sins. That doesn’t mean simply saying that you are a sinner, but really recognizing it from the depths of your heart because that is where the healing happens. St. Nikolai of Zicha writes, “It is of more importance to the Lord that a man acknowledge and confess his sickness and cry for help in his heart than with this tongue, for the tongue is capable of deception, but the heart is not.” As Christians we demonstrate our true heartfelt compunction and repentance by coming to a priest and confessing in his presence. This is a difficult thing to do because it requires humility. In the sacrament of confession we confess with our tongue but we must have a heartfelt desire to bring these sins to the priest. It requires us to bring our sins out of hiding in the depths and into the light where they can be exposed to the Son. |
| “We Should Approach a Person As a Mystery” Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, 1969 We heard today the story of the man born blind. We do not know from experience what physical blindness is, but we can imagine how this man was walled in himself, how all the world around him existed only as a distant sound, something he could not picture, imagine. He was a prisoner within his own body. He could live by imaginations, he could invent a world around himself, he could by touch and by hearing approximate what really was around him; but the total, full reality could only escape him. We are not physically blind, but how many of us are locked in themselves! Who of us can say that he is so open that he can perceive all the world in its width, but also in its depth? We meet people, and we see them with our eyes; but seldom it happens that beyond the outer shape, features, clothes, – how often does it happen that we see something of the depth of the person? How seldom it is that we look into a person’s eyes and go deep in understanding! We are surrounded by people and every person is unique to God, but are people unique to us? Are not people that surround us just ‘people’, who have names, surnames, nicknames, whom we can recognise by their outer looks but whom we do not know at any depth? This is our condition: we are blind, we are deaf, we are insensitive to the outer world, and yet, we are called to read meanings. When we meet a person, we should approach this person as a mystery, that is as something which we can discover only by a deep communion, by entering into a relationship, perhaps silent, perhaps in words, but so deep that we can know one another not quite as God knows us, but in the light of God that enlightens all and each of us. And more than this: we can do, each within his own power, within his own gifts, what Christ did: He opened the eyes of this man. What did this man see? The first thing he saw was the face of the Incarnate Son of God, in other words, he saw love incarnate. When his eyes met the eyes of Christ, he met God’s compassion, God’s tenderness, God’s earnest concern and understanding. In the same way could so many people begin to see, if by meeting us they meet people in whose eyes, on whose face they could see the shining of earnest, sober love, of a love that is not sentimental but is seeing, a love that can see and understand. And then, how much could we be to people around us a revelation of all the meanings that this world holds and contains through art, through beauty, through science, through all the means by which beauty is perceived and proclaimed among human beings. |
| Seeking the Presence of God With All Our Strength At that time, when Jesus departed thence, two blind men followed Him, crying, and saying, “Thou Son of David, have mercy on us.” And when He was come into the house, the blind men came to Him: and Jesus saith unto them, “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” They said unto Him, “Yea, Lord.” Then touched He their eyes, saying, “According to your faith be it unto you.” And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, “See that no man know it.” But they, when they were departed, spread abroad His fame in all that country. As they went out, behold, they brought to Him a dumb man possessed with a demon. And when the demon was cast out, the dumb spake: and the multitude marvelled, saying, “It was never so seen in Israel.” But the Pharisees said, “He casteth out demons through the prince of demons.” And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people (Matthew 9:27-35). I greet you all, dear brothers and sisters, on this Sunday. Today at the Divine Liturgy we heard the Gospel reading in which the Holy Apostle Matthew tells of how our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ dwelt in the city in which He often abode: Capernaum. This city stood on the crossroads of trade routs on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum was a very noisy city, quite populous for those times. The Lord often came to this city, because many of His friends and acquaintances were there. He stayed with them and preached in the city. Those who heard the Savior’s words spread these glad tidings not only within Capernaum, but also to the countries from which they had come. The Lord performed many miracles in this city, one of which the Holy Evangelist Matthew describes today. Two blind men followed the Lord and tried to approach Him, because they had heard that the Lord performed healings. They believed that God’s power, if it touched them, could grant them their vision. We know what vision means for man. When someone loses his vision, he loses his spatial orientation and cannot see the world’s beauty, which the Lord created. He perceives this world either tactilely or orally. This is a terrible loss for human life. Yet these people followed Christ. |
| Скачать epub pdf Preparation To Lent 2 February I973 In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We are now, day after day, coming up to Holy Week and to Easter; already last week we heard a reading of the Gospel that prepares for this ascent. This long preparation that leads us from Christmas to the Resurrection is divided in the Orthodox Church in several periods, a first period in which the readings of the Gospel and the prayers of the Church are addressed to us; we are confronted with a succession of situations and we are called to go through a succession of self-examinations that will lead us to the time, to the moment when, having prepared ourselves, we can then turn away from ourselves and concentrate our attention only on what will be happening, on the Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ. In these weeks of preparation we will be confronted with several readings that indicate to us what we have got to face in us and what we have got to overcome in order freely to stand in the presence of the mystery of salvation. Last week we were faced with the blind Bartimaeus; he knew he was blind because his blindness was physical and he was aware that the world around him was unattainable, was beyond reach and beyond his grasp. We live in a world which is not only material; right at the core of this world, active, transforming, transfiguring both the spiritual reality of it and the physical reality of it, is our Living God. Are we not completely blind to His presence? Do we not live in complete darkness, do we see, do we perceive another dimension than space and time, another object of contemplation than people and things around us? Indeed, when we are confronted with people, do we see anything beyond objects, do we see in them the depth of the human mystery, the greatness of their eternal calling, the dimension of God and eternity in them and in all that is around us? Today we have heard the story of Zachaeus. Zachaeus had one thing to overcome in order to be able to meet Christ face to face: vanity, the fear of human judgement, the fear of ridicule. This man, well known in his city, accepted the humiliation of being laughed at, because he so earnestly wanted to see Christ. He was not a good man, but there was in him a depth that could not be satisfied with the life he led, there was in him a longing so strong, so powerful that he passed by human judgement in order to meet Christ face to face, and he met Him. Of all the crowd whom Christ saw with His eyes, He saw particularly that man, He called him down from the tree, and He went with him, bringing into his house all the fullness of the divine presence, and all the glory of salvation that had now come to him. |
| A Man Born Blind, Jonah, Job and A Believer Fr. Ted Bobosh And his disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) The question the disciples ask the Lord Jesus in John 9 has taken on new and personal meaning with me. When some hear that I have been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, they often ask two questions: Were you a smoker? Is there a history of lung cancer in your family? The questions are logical—people trying to make sense of the lung cancer diagnosis. Obviously if you were a smoker (you sinned), the lung cancer is the consequence of your behavior. Or if your family has a history of lung cancer, then it is your ancestors who passed the gene along to you (parent’s ‘sin’). What the logic does of course is put the person at ease, for if there is a clear cause and effect of sin to disease, my interlocutor can feel safe that the world is reasonable and logical. People get lung cancer because they smoked/sinned or the inherited the sin from their parents. Such logic helps people get through the day and helps them avoid thinking about their own mortality, but we all know the world is a bit more unpredictable than our reason allows. The Holy Prophet Job got his story in our Scriptures. Retributive justice is not always at work, or the only force at work, or may not even remotely be the cause of the effect. My history is I was not a tobacco smoker, and there is no known history of lung cancer. There is no doubt some cause for the lung cancer, but as the doctors have told me, we will never know what caused my lung cancer to begin. Believers in the ancient world did not have an explanatory category of “natural causes.” For me in the scientific world, I can see there are natural disasters whose causes can be explained by natural forces. The right collection of natural forces will produce a tornado or an earthquake or an epidemic. I don’t have to think that every event is caused by an angry God. The ancients, lacking a “natural disaster” category tended to interpret all things as acts of God. What was not ever certain was exactly what caused God to act in a particularly destructive way. Many theories were proposed: sin, icons, lack of icons, unwillingness of people to change, people too willing to change. The Prophet Jonah, one can recall, was distraught that God didn’t destroy the city of Nineveh. He proclaimed the city would be destroyed, hoped it would happen, and then was disappointed that God didn’t do it. Jonah laments what he knows about God: I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing (Jonah 4:2). Sadly many people today share Jonah’s lament and don’t want God to be merciful, abounding in love and ready to relent from punishing. They prefer the God of retribution not the God who is revealed by Jonah or by Jesus. |
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