The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XXVII: On Stillness of Mind and Body, Part IV

Philokalia Ministries

In pursuing life in Christ, the experience of reality is often turned on its head. Our perception of the world around us and the interior world is shaped and formed by so many forces and influences. In a counterintuitive fashion, we have to move in opposing directions to the things that satisfy our ego or the desires of the flesh.

Needless to say this can be disconcerting. We may see ourselves as understanding the faith or as having grown in certain virtues only to have it dispersed in an instant by the light of God’s truth. Whether it is something small or great, we can see how far we are from the stillness of mind and body of which Saint John speaks. Indeed, St. John tells us that many of these things the common run of men will find quite alien to themselves.

We are often cast about on the sea of our emotions or blown like a reed in the wind. We struggle with a certain aberration of mind; that is, we are ever so inconstant and changeable in the way that we live our lives. If one does not acknowledge this and struggle throughout the years to purify the heart, then to enter into the life of solitude and stillness can only lead to derangement.

If what guides us is not the humble love and desire to give ourselves over completely to Christ then we are going to be fragmented internally by the most fierce passions. Anger will increase and even the memories of past wounds within the mind can fuel our resentment and drive us to the brink of madness. The person who enters into stillness well is completely unruffled by the chaos that exist in our world and becomes abstracted from the things that take hold of other peoples imagination as having great value. For the hesychast, however, there is only Christ!

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Text of chat during the group:

00:06:08 Greg C: Father, is that still Step 27? I missed last week. 00:06:16 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: page 226 paragraph 32 00:06:24 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: yes. Step 27 00:06:33 Greg C: Thank you! 00:09:50 Bob Cihak, AZ: Will our next book be Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian, by Holy Transfiguration Monastery? 00:10:14 Adam Paige: Reacted to " …" with ☦️ 00:25:08 Art: Where can a lay person obtain a basic rule to follow, to grow with, and progress in? 00:27:19 Adam Paige: https://store.melkite.org/product/publicans-prayer-book/ 00:27:49 Art: Reacted to "https://store.melkit..." with 👍 00:40:04 Cindy Moran: also " to make sublime " 00:56:28 Fr Marty, AZ: Being with people who push my buttons, seems to me, to be one of God’s most common ways of showing me what He wants to heal in me. Metropolitan Vlachos, with his priests in mind, once wrote a book on the healing found in the Desert Fathers. He admitted that they had a good academic study of theology, but he lamented that they did not know how to lead their flocks into healing because they had not gone down the path to their own healing. His remark in the book was, “Theology…is the fruit of a man’s healing.” 01:01:20 Ren Witter: That day, I might have gotten a message from Fr. Charbel saying he was going into permanent seclusion 😂 01:01:57 Julie’s iPad: St Diadochos taught: “ Just as, when the doors of the baths are left continually open,the heat inside is quickly driven out,so also the soul, when it wishes to say many things, even though everything that it says may be good, disperses its concentration through the door of the voice”. 01:12:45 David: 😀 01:13:00 Greg C: 😁 01:13:13 Fr Marty, AZ: :) 01:13:26 Cindy Moran: Thank you Father...excellent session. 01:13:27 Jeff O.: Thank you! 01:13:32 David: Thank you father! 01:13:33 Lorraine Green: Thank you 01:13:40 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you🙂