Tag: hope

On Faith, Hope and Love, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, step #30

“All that remains,” the last chapter begins, “is the triad of faith, hope and love to be fully united to God.” 

At the 30th and last step of the ladder, we have  finally arrived at the summit: theosis or union with God.

When I was younger, I would have expected something rare and powerful at the very top of the Ladder. Infinite wisdom, perhaps; eternal life on earth, immediate sainthood, power over others, miracle-granting authority! Extraordinarily, at the very top of the Ladder is a triad of virtues, with the highest among them being love. Instead of magic powers, we achieve a spiritual state that, though hard, is possible to be achieved by all.

The purpose of all the battles against passions and the cultivation of virtues along  our long ascent on the ladder was to finally experience love in its fullness. Since God is love, we become one with Him. 

To understand the concept of love in the writings of the desert fathers, we must banish our associations with romantic love or obsessive passion. Christian love is not  selective or conditional. It does not ebb and flow with circumstances or mood. Having shed our passions through our ascendance on the ladder, we are free from the blindness of personal agendas, resentments, jealousies, recrimination, desire to control and all the other passions that separate us from God. We are now able to see the image of God in others, regardless of their behavior, flaws, circumstances or mood.

Having achieved the ability to love fully we have not simply acquired a virtue, but become transformed in God’s image:

Love is by its nature resemblance of God, insofar as this is humanly possible.

Achieving theosis is a state beyond words or actions, a true “inebriation of the soul.” When your heart is filled with love, it transforms the way you see and experience the world.

Love grants prophecy, miracles. It is an abyss of illumination, a fountain of fire, bubbling up to inflame the thirsty soul. It is the condition of angels and the progress of eternity. You cannot love God and hate your neighbor because you now see God in him.

You experience love’s “distinctive character,” and thus become “a fountain of faith, an abyss of patience, a sea of humility.” Fear disappears when love consumes you.

Fear shows up when love departs.  Lack of fear means that you are either filled with love or dead in spirit, John observes.

A metaphor often used to communicate the intensity of our love for God is that of a person deeply in love. Just as someone besought with erotic love can think of nothing but the object of that love, those who ascend to the top of the ladder are so consumed by divine love that they may forget to eat and are unaware of physical needs.

Yet unlike bodily passions love of God is not uncontrollable, suffocating and destructive. It does not obliterate our identity and sense of self. Christ gave up his life out of love but retained his personhood.  Instead of consuming and destroying, love of God transforms.

Hope is the power behind love. When hope goes, so does love. “Hope comes from the experience of the Lord’s gifts, and someone with no such experience must be ever in doubt.”  Hope is destroyed by anger.

John’s last admonition is also a glorification: 

We are here at the summit,” he reminds us. “Let the ladder teach us the spiritual unity of these virtues so the “grossness of the flesh” will not hold us back.  And the chapter ends with an unequivocal declaration.

Remaining now are faith, hope and love, these three. But love is the greatest of them all.” (1 Cor. 13:13)

The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus: ON DISCERNMENT (Step 26)

 

Acquiring virtues, rung by rung in the Ladder, is not a simple, linear act. In this chapter, John explores the complexity of virtues; the thin and changeable boundaries that sometimes barely distinguish them from passions.  We have reached a higher level of spiritual growth at this stage that requires more than fighting passions—the understanding of the nuances of truth and the ability to clarify even the subtlest shades of ambiguity. This is why discernment, in addition to hard labor, is necessary at this rung of the Ladder. John highlights some of ambiguities and nuances of situations we should be aware of.

For one thing, the struggle for spiritual ascent is not uniform. John recognizes that virtues like silence, humility and temperance may come easily to some personalities while others have to struggle against their own natures to achieve them. Because the latter clearly have to work harder, John (somewhat reluctantly) considers their achievement to be a little higher than the others’.

Another complexity is that virtue is often mingled with malice and requires discernment and alertness to detect the dividing line between them. Love may conceal lust; hospitality, gluttony; discernment, cunning manipulation of a situation; hope, laziness; tranquility, despondency. To make this message clearer, John likens it to drawing water from a well and accidentally bringing up a frog with it. 

Over-achievement of virtues or pursuing them to earn praise is a grave danger that is no different from  the soul-destroying addictions of our own times–obsession with achievement and professional status; addictions to ambitions that turn us into workaholics; and lives spinning out of control by stretching our budgets, habits or expectations beyond what we can afford or deliver, plunging us into constant anxiety, fear and, eventually, despair.

John probes even more deeply into the risks of delusion and calls for extraordinary and finely hewn ability for discernment. “Monks should spare no effort in becoming a shining example in all things,” he states. Yet even when reaching for heaven we may be in danger of spreading ourselves too thinly, and “have our wretched souls be pulled in all directions, to take on, alone, a fight against a thousand upon thousands and ten thousands upon ten thousands of enemies, since the understanding of their evil workings, indeed even the listing of them, is beyond our capacities.”   I can’t imagine a more accurate description of men and women in our time–the modern professional, driven executive or ambitious soccer mom with a management agenda for her children’s lives.  The alternative is to discern God’s will for the right balance. “Instead, let us marshal the Holy Trinity to help us” John advises. Yet it takes humility to give us the discernment to acknowledge the reality of our limitation and need for God’s help.  And it takes patience to discern God’s will:

Discernment will also help us make a crucially important distinction—that between God’s will and timing and delusion and false timing, forced by our own will. “If God, who made dry land out of the sea for the Israelites to cross, dwells within us, then the Israel within us, the mind that looks to God, will surely make a safe crossing of this sea…”  And John adds:  if God “has not yet arrived in us, who will understand the roaring of the waves, that is, of our bodies?   Let’s pray for God to dwell in us and for humility to discern his will.