Kallistos Ware: Experiencing God and The Advance on the Path

yes it is a deeper and deeper experience an ever-increasing knowledge and ever closer Union you will see that I'm using phrases that imply that theosis is never complete never total God is infinite and so we never get to the end of him sure the more experienced God the more we realize how little we know about him who is Christ yes we read the Gospels and there we have a picture of Christ but while it is a true picture it's never an exhaustive picture we go on learning more and more who Christ is through our personal experience in the spirit so yes we have to balance together the already and the not yet already we are children of God already through baptism and Holy Communion we share in the divine life but we do not yet know in our conscious experience exactly what that means and so we go on advancing further there are different ways of thinking of this advance one classic writer in the Eastern Christian tradition some john climacus habit of Mount Sinai in the 7th century wrote a book entitled the ladder of divine ascent that's a classical Orthodox spirituality he envisaged the Christian life in terms of a ladder with 30 runs other orthodox writers think of three deepening levels first of all that is what in the Eastern tradition is termed the active life which doesn't necessarily mean the life of a missionary or schoolteacher it means the acquiring of the virtues and the overcoming of our evil passions so the active life means carrying into practice through the things that we do day by day the faith in which we believe but then they distinguish a second stage which is called the contemplation of nature or natural contemplation this means to see God in all things and all things in God it is to treat the world around us as a sacrament of God's presence as we praise God for the beauty that is the second stage and then they distinguish a third stage some Christians have an experience of God himself not just God in nature but God in himself that would be an experience beyond words beyond images a direct intuition of the reality of God and that is seen as the highest level the third level or the deepest level of your lie which is called not just contemplation nature but contemplation of God the Greek father's call it theology by which they don't mean an academic discipline in which you attend lectures and then sit examinations and are awarded classes first second or third but they mean an actual experience direct are mediated of the presence of God now these are not Racine as three successive stages they are rather deepening or ascending levels which continue servile taneous Lee right up to the end of life we go on repenting we never get beyond repentance and we go on drying in action to live the Christian life and were overcome the bad impulses inside ourselves that's never a complete process I remember when I was at school one of my fellow school people left early and he said he wanted to work evil out of his system so he went and played a piano in a nightclub and so far as I know he's still there he's never bought the end of getting rid of the evil in his system with God's help so right up to the end of life we are still on a journey on the level of the active life of trying to realize in ourselves and in what we do and think a more complete and full sharing in the life of Christ but then we can advance perhaps to the second level of seeing the world in God treating the world of sacrament perhaps not all of us will advance to the third level in this life though we may have glimpses moments when we are taken out of ourselves and suddenly feel that we are in God and he is in us but when people talk of contemplating God beyond words beyond language beyond all images some of us may feel that's far beyond what I can achieve but we can walk about the world and sense God's presence in the world that is a form of contemplation possible for all of us stop look listen God is here in each thing I see in each person I meet

Channel: Transformative Heart

Views: 2,900

Rating: 4.9540229 out of 5

Keywords: God, Mysticism, Kallistos Ware, Theology, Theosis, Jesus Christ, Jesus Prayer, Ladder of Divine Ascent, Orthodox Christianity, Christianity

Id: EzJvhWrA3k4

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2017