Dan Everiss
<oregdan@hotmail.com> | Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 1:59 PM |
|
|
"The Choir of the Saints have found the Fountain of Life and Door of Paradise. May I also find the right way
through repentance. I am the lost sheep. Recall me, O Saviour and
save me!"
O All Saints, Pray to God for Us!
On All the Saints
St. Gregory the Wonderworker
Grant thy blessing, Lord.
It was my desire to be silent, and not to make a public display of the
rustic rudeness of my tongue. For silence is a matter of great
consequence when one's speech is mean. And to refrain from utterance is
indeed an admirable thing, where there is lack of training;
and verily he is the highest philosopher who knows how to cover
his ignorance by abstinence from public address. Knowing, therefore, the
feebleness of tongue proper to me, I should have preferred such a
course. Nevertheless the spectacle of the onlookers impels
me to speak. Since, then, this solemnity is a glorious one among
our festivals, and the spectators form a crowded gathering, and our
assembly is one of elevated fervour in the faith, I shall face the task
of commencing an address with confidence. And this
I may attempt all the more boldly, since the Father requests me, and
the Church is with me, and the sainted martyrs with this object
strengthen what is weak in me. For these have inspired aged men to
accomplish with much love a long course, and constrained
them to support their failing steps by the staff of the word; and they
have stimulated women to finish their course like the young men, and
have brought to this, too, those of tender years, yea, even creeping
children. In this wise have the martyrs shown their
power, leaping with joy in the presence of death, laughing at the sword,
making sport of the wrath of princes, grasping at death as the producer
of deathlessness, making victory their own by their fall, through the
body taking their leap to heaven, suffering
their members to be scattered abroad in order that they might
hold their souls, and, bursting the bars of life, that they might open
the gates of heaven. And if any one believes not that death is
abolished, that Hades is trodden under foot, that the chains
thereof are broken, that the tyrant is bound, let him look on
the martyrs disporting themselves in the presence of death, and
taking up the jubilant strain of the victory of Christ. O the marvel!
Since the hour when Christ despoiled Hades, men have danced
in triumph over death. O death, where is your sting! O grave, where is
your victory? (1 Corinthians 15:55) Hades and the devil have been
despoiled, and stripped of their ancient armor, and cast out of
their peculiar power. And even as Goliath had his head
cut off with his own sword, so also is the devil, who has been the
father of death, put to rout through death; and he finds that the
selfsame thing which he was wont to use as the ready weapon of
his deceit, has become the mighty instrument of his own destruction.
Yea, if we may so speak, casting his hook at the Godhead, and seizing
the wonted enjoyment of the baited pleasure, he is himself manifestly
caught while he deems himself the captor, and discovers that in place
of man he has touched God. By reason thereof
do the martyrs leap upon the head of the dragon, and despise every species of
torment. For since the second Adam has brought up the first Adam out of
the deeps of Hades, as Jonah was delivered out of the whale, and has
set forth him who was deceived as a citizen
of heaven to the shame of the deceiver, the gates of Hades have been
shut, and the gates of heaven have been opened, so as to offer an
unimpeded entrance to those who rise there in faith. In olden time,
Jacob beheld a ladder erected reaching to heaven, and
the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. But now, having
been made man for man's sake, He who is the Friend of Man, has
crushed with the foot of His divinity him who is the enemy of man, and
has borne up the man with the hand of His Christhood, and
has made the trackless ether to be trodden by the feet of man. Then
the angels were ascending and descending; but now the Angel of the Great
Counsel neither ascends nor descends: for whence or where shall He
change His position, who is present everywhere,
and Who filleth all things, and holds in His hand the ends of the world?
Once, indeed, He descended, and once He ascended,— not, however,
through any change of nature, but only in the condescension of His
philanthropic Christhood; and He is seated as the Word with
the Father, and as the Word He dwells in the womb, and as the Word He is
found everywhere, and is never separated from the God of
the universe. Aforetime did the devil deride the nature of man with
great laughter, and he has had his joy over the times of our
calamity as his festal-days. But the laughter is only a three days'
pleasure, while the wailing is eternal; and his great laughter has
prepared for him a greater wailing and ceaseless tears,
and inconsolable weeping, and a sword in his heart. This sword did
our Leader forge against the enemy with fire in the virgin furnace, in
such wise and after such fashion as He willed, and gave it its point by
the energy of His invincible divinity, and dipped it in the water of an
undefiled baptism, and sharpened it by sufferings
without passion in them, and made it bright by
the Mystical Resurrection; and herewith by Himself He put to death the
vengeful adversary, together with his whole host. What manner of word,
therefore, will express our joy or his misery? For he who was once
an archangel is now a devil; he who once lived in heaven is now seen
crawling like a serpent upon earth; he who once was jubilant with
the cherubim, is now shut up in pain in the guard-house of swine; and
him, too, in fine, shall we put to rout if we mind those
things which are contrary to his choice, by the grace and kindness
of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory and the power unto the
ages of the ages. Amen.
|
|
