The Shepherd, July 2004
BLESSED IS THE MAN, 2
True, God-pleasing faith, in which there is nothing false or deceptive, consists in the fulfiling of the commandments of the Gospel, in love of labour and in the continual grafting of these into one’s soul; it consists also in a struggle with reason and with those feelings, and movements of the heart and body which are against God. For the reason, the heart and the body of fallen man are set at enmity with God’s law. Fallen reason does not accept God’s reason; the fallen heart is set against God’s will; the body itself, being subject to corruption, grasps onto its own separate will, which was given it through the Fall, whereby the death-bearing knowledge of good and evil was so abundantly communicated to man. Our path to the wisdom of God is a narrow and afflicted one! Holy faith, which breaks contrariness and the reason, heart and body of fallen nature, leads us to her. Here patience is necessary. Here we need firmness, constancy and long-suffering. In your patience possess ye your souls. He who desires to receive spiritual fruit, let him with patience pass through various prolonged, fraught upheavals and misfortunes in the war against sin. Only he will see the fruit of the Spirit on the tree of his soul, who cherishes this holy, tender fruit with much and manful patience. Let us hearken, let us hearken yet again to Wisdom! Wisdom, it says, at first will walk with them, her disciples, on tortuous paths; she will bring fear and dread upon them, and will torment them by her discipline, until she trusteth them, and she will test them with her ordinances. Then she will come straight back to them again and gladden them, and will reveal her mysteries to them (Sir. 4:17:18).
Days, months and years go by, then its time comes, the time known only to God, the times and years that He hath put in His own power (Acts 1:7), and the tree, which is planted by the streams of the waters, will bring forth its fruit. This fruit is the clear communion of the Holy Spirit, which was promised by the Son of God to all who truly believe in Him. The fruit of the Spirit is splendid, wondrous! It transforms the whole man. It translates the Sacred Scriptures from books into the soul; with an invisible finger it inscribes on tablets, that is on the mind and heart, the word of God and the will of God, Word and Spirit. There is fulfiled in such a man the promise of the Son of God: Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. But this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive (John 7:38-39), which saying of the Saviour’s His beloved disciple, the initiate of His wisdom, to whom He had imparted Theology, expounds. The very leaves of such a tree do not fall (Ps. 1:3). The leaf, by the interpretation of the Fathers, means the physical struggles, and even they will receive their recompense, incorruption and life, when the soul is renewed, reborn by the Holy Spirit. The will of such a man blends into one with the will of God; he desires only what is pleasing to God, only to fulfil the will of God. For this reason, he has God as his fellow promoter in all his initiatives and all things whatsoever he may do shall prosper (Ps. 1:3).
 Things are not thus for the ungodly! The inspired David does not compare them with the trees or even with anything else that has characteristics which are indications of life. For them there is a completely different comparison. Not so are the ungodly, not so, the royal Prophet sings out, but rather they are like the chaff which the wind doth hurl away from the face of the earth (Ps. 1:4). You ungodly ones, you are lifeless dust, caught up in the swirls of the storm, that is the noises of this vain world, caught up from the face of the earth, twisting in the air, as insubstantial as a dense cloud which nonetheless obscures the sun from all nature.
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