Превод от английски
Скъпи в Христа братя и сестри,
Много отдавна ни
научиха да казваме „Прости ми“. Научихме се да казваме тези думи в детството, винаги
когато искахме братята и сестрите ни да продължат да си играят с нас, или
искахме майка да ни позволи да гледаме телевизия вечер. В младостта си се
научихме да ги казваме, когато искахме да възобновим дългите часове разговори
по телефона с приятел или да си шушукаме на чиновете в училище. …
Като възрастни, се стремим да постигнем мир с възрастните си родители, когато
ни се оплакват – със или без причина, както и да постигнем мир със същите тези
близки приятели и в крайна сметка с тези, които обичаме.
Въпреки това, с напредване на възрастта все по-често има моменти, когато думите
„прости ми“ придобиват по-дълбоко значение, отколкото когато ги изричаме
мимоходом, между други неща и мисли.
Тогава фразата, толкова лесна и удобна като начин за решаване на проблеми,
става непоносимо тежка и трудна.
Засяда на езика, блъска силно вътре в главите ни и слага буца в гърлото ни.
Струва ни се, че можем да се убедим да се откажем от задължението си да
поискаме прошка, защото нямаме време или защото „нещата ще се решат от само
себе си“, или защото „той/тя вече разбира“. Дори няма да засягаме толкова
удобните извинения „и все пак – защо да го правя?!” или „сам си е виновен“.
И така тези неизречени фрази се натрупват и все по-рядко сърцето е обхванато от
угризения на съвестта.
Постепенно свикваме с факта, че ходенето става по-малко
лесно, отколкото беше, че е по-трудно да дишаме свободно и че да се вярва не е
толкова просто.
Започва да ни се струва, че винаги е било така и винаги ще бъде тъй.
Тогава идва единственият ден в годината, когато неизбежно и директно сме
изправени пред мисълта за неплатения си дълг.
Когато е невъзможно да се извърнем, да си наврем главите в черупките си или да
се скрием зад различни стандартни извинения и причини.
И доста често имаме много повече дългове, отколкото се сещаме в тези няколко първи
минути:
„Прости ми” към родителите – че се дразня от съветите им, от рутинните им
оплаквания за здравето. В края на краищата, някой ден ще бъдем на другия край
на телефонната линия, [оплаквайки се] на децата си.
„Прости ми“ към нашите деца – че не прекарвахме минути и часове с тях, че не ги
хвалехме на глас, че не се въздържахме от груби думи.
„Прости ми“, отправено към тези, които обичаме – за всичките ни действия,
несъвместими с понятието „любов“. …
„Прости ми” към тези, на които сме длъжници – че толкова бързо забравихме за
дълга.
„Прости ми“, отправено към онези, които са ни длъжници – за това, че все още
помним този дълг.
„Прости ми” отправено към Този, Който с такава любов и загриженост ни даде и
продължава да ни дава живот, независимо колко пъти сме забравяли или пропускали
да кажем „прости”…
„Прости ми“ на онази, която всеки ден моли своя Син да ни даде повече време, в
което да се опомним и осъзнаем всичко това.
И все по-често, за да изстържем тежестта на неизказаното, което здраво е залепнало
за нас, са необходими големи усилия. Но само веднъж изпитайте какво е да дишате
дълбоко, да усетите колко по-лесно е да вървите с високо вдигната глава – това е
нещо, което няма да забравите, нещо, което ще ви кара да се втурвате да търсите
тази прошка всяка година . И още по-добре – всеки ден. Цял живот.
Струва си да прекарате този ден, изтръгвайки от сговорчиво забравящата си памет
онези хора, пред които вината ви се е трупала дълго време или се е появила
внезапно и неволно, докато сте „препускали с пълна скорост“. Онези, пред които
съвестта ни казва, че тепърва трябва да бъдем оправдани.
Две думи - „Прости ми.“
Те не гарантират, че в бъдеще няма да правим грешки или да бъдем несправедливи,
но в тях се крие възможността отново да намерим способността да вярваме
истински и да обичаме истински.
И така, когато започваме нашето поклонение в
Светата земя на Пасха, прости на мен, ... , всички мои
прегрешения, които са засегнали теб и твоите (близки).
Господи, смили се над
мен грешника!
В XC,
о. Виктор, 2024 г.
a sermon by Fr, Macarius († 3Aug2014)
Of all the Lenten hymns and prayers, one short prayer could be termed
THE Lenten Prayer. It is traditional, and probably one of the great teachers of
spiritual life is Saint Ephraim the Syrian. Here is the text:
“O Lord and Master of
my life,
а spirit of idleness, despondency, ambition and idle talking
give me not. (prostration)
But rather a spirit
of chastity, humble-mindedness, patience and love,
bestow upon me Thy
servant. (prostration)
Yea, O Lord and King,
grant me to see my failings and not condemn my brother;
for blessed art Thou
unto the ages of ages. Amen.” (prostration)
(Note: This
prayer is read in the Hours of
Wednesday and Friday of Cheese Fare Week and
in all services of the Great Fast, except those of
Saturday and Sunday.)
(Prayerbook)
This
prayer is read twice at the end of each Lenten service Monday through Friday,
not on Saturdays and Sundays because on these days on Sundays we celebrate the
Resurrection and Saturdays the Sabbath and the fast is restricted. At
first reading of this, a prostration follows each petition and at the end we
bow also 12 times and say, “O God, cleanse me a sinner.” And the entire prayer is repeated with
one final prostration at the end.
And
why does this short prayer occupy such an important position in the entire
Lenten worship? Because it enumerates, in a unique way, all the negative and
positive elements of repentance and constitutes, so to say, a checklist for the
individual Lenten effort. This effort is aimed first at our liberation
from such fundamental spiritual diseases which shape our life and make it
virtually impossible for us to even to start turning ourselves to God.
Getting
back to the word prostration, in the Greek, metania, means to change one’s
mind. So by passing from an erect position to one bowing you are changing
your mind also with your body. The basic disease of speaking of √sloth which is a
strange combination of laziness and passivity and our entire being which always
pushes us down rather than up which constantly convinces us no change is
possible, and therefore desirable. It is a fact that deeply-rooted
cynicism which to every spiritual challenge responds, “What for?” and makes our
lives difficult at its very source. The result of sloth is √faint-heartedness –
this is a state of despondency which all spiritual fathers consider the
greatest danger for the soul.
Despondency
is the impossibility for man to see anything good or positive. It is a
reduction of everything to negativism and pessimism. It is truly a
demonic power in us because the devil is fundamentally a liar. He lies to
man about God and about the world. He fills life with darkness and
negation. Despondency is a suicide of the soul because when man is
possessed by it, he is unable to see the light or desire it. Also it
matches his √lust for
power. Strange as it may seem, it is precisely
sloth and despondency that fill our life with lust for power by vitiating the
entire attitude to our life and making it meaningless and empty, they force us
to seek compensation and a radically wrong attitude towards other
persons.
If
my life is not oriented to God nor aimed at eternal values, it will inevitably
become selfish, self-centered and this means that all things become means of my
own self-satisfaction. If God is not the Lord and Master of my life, then
I become my own lord and master, the absolute center of my own world and I
begin to evaluate everything in terms of my needs, my ideas, my desires and my
judgment. The lust for power is thus a fundamental depravity in my
relationship to other beings, a search for their subordination to me. It
does not necessarily express the actual urge to co-manage others and may result
as well in indifference, contempt, lack of interest and respect. It is
indeed sloth and despondency directed this time at others that it completes
spiritual suicide with spiritual murder.
Finally
√idle talk - of all created beings, man alone has been endowed with the gift
of speech. All the Fathers see it as the very seal of the divine image in man
because God himself has revealed his Word as in the first chapter of the Gospel
of John. But being the supreme gift, it is by the same token the supreme
danger being the very expression of man. The means of his fulfillment is
for this very reason the means of his fall and self-destruction of a trail of
sins - the word saves and the word kills, the word inspires and the word
poisons, the Word is the means of Truth and is the means of demonic lie.
Having ultimate positive power is, therefore, tremendous negative power.
It creates negatively when it deviates from its divine origin and purpose.
The word becomes idle and forces sloth and despondency, and lust for power, and
transforms life into the very power of sin. These four are thus the
negative objects of repentance; they are the obstacles to be removed but God
alone can remove them.
Hence
the first part of the Lenten prayer described from the bottom of human
helplessness, then the prayer moves to the positive aims of repentance which
also are four.
√Chastity - if one does
not reduce this term as often and as erroneously done only to sexual
connotation, it is understood as the positive counterpart of sloth. Exact
and full translations of the Greek sofrosini and the Russian tselomoodrie
ought to be whole-mindedness. Sloth is the first of all dissipation, the
brokenness of our vision and energy, the inability to see the whole its
opposite then, is precisely wholeness. If we use to mean by chastity the
virtue opposed to sexual depravities, it is because the broken character of our
existence is nowhere better manifested than in sexual lust, the alienation of
the body from the light that controls the spirit.
Christ
restores wholeness in us and He does so by restoring to us the true scale of
values by leading us back to God. The first and wonderful fruit of this
wholeness or chastity is √humility. We already spoke of it - it is above
everything else the victory of truth in us, the elimination of all lies in
which we usually live. Humility alone is capable of truth, of seeing and
accepting things as they are and therefore seeing God’s majesty and goodness in
love and everything. That’s why we are told that God gives grace to the
humble and resists the proud.
Chastity
and humility are naturally followed by √patience. The natural
or fallen man is impatient for being blind to himself, he is quick to judge and
condemn others. Having but a broken, incomplete and distorted knowledge
of everything, he measures all things by his tastes and ideas, being indifferent
to everyone except himself, he wants life to be successful right here and now.
Patience, however, is a truly divine virtue. God is patient not because
he is indulgent, but because he sees the depth of all that exists and the inner
reality of things which in our blindness we do not see, is open to Him.
The closer we come to God, the more patient we grow and the more we reflect
that infinite respect for all beings which is a proper quality of God.
Finally,
the crown of all virtues, all of growth and effort is √Love. That love, as
we have already said, can be given by God alone - the gift which is the goal of
all spiritual preparation and practice. All this is summarized and
brought together to the concluding petition of the Lenten prayer in which we ask
to see our own errors and not to judge my brother.
But,
ultimately, there is but one danger – pride. Pride is the source of
evil and all evil is pride. It is not enough for me to see my own errors,
for even this apparent virtue can be turned into pride. Spiritual
writings are full of warnings against the subtle forms of pseudo piety which,
in reality, are the cover of humility and self-accusation and can lead to a
truly demonic pride. When we see our own errors and do not judge our
brothers, when in other terms chastity, humility, patience and love are but one
in us, then and only then the ultimate enemy pride will be destroyed in
us.
After
each petition, we make a prostration. As I said, prostrations are not
limited to the prayer of Saint Ephraim, but can consequently be the distinctive
characteristic of the entire length of worship. Here, however, their
meaning is disclosed best of all. In the long and difficult effort of
spiritual recovery, the Church does not separate the soul from the body.
The whole man has fallen away from God, the whole man is to be restored, the
whole man is to return. The catastrophe of sin lies precisely in the
victory of the flesh, the animal, the irrational, the lust in us, of the
spiritual and the divine. But the body is glorious, the body is
holy. So holy that God himself became flesh. Salvation and
repentance then are not contempt for the body or neglect of it, but restoration
of the body to its real function as an expression and light of spirit. As
a temple, the price is the human soul. To be a Christian, in a sense, is
a fight not against but for the body. For this reason the whole man, soul
and body repents. The body participates in the prayer of the soul just as
the soul prays through and in the body. Prostration is a sign of
repentance and humility, of adoration and obedience are thus a lenten rite of
par excellence. And in the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy a hymn reads: “Let us
abstain from sin as we abstain from food.” Amen.
