Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord, as well as with the completion of the second week of Great Lent!

On this day the Holy Orthodox Church marks the memory of the Holy Hierarch Gregory Palamas. Perhaps some of you question why the memory of this saint is celebrated during Lent. He is remembered not as a great faster, not as an example of penitence, nor as a teacher of an ascetic life; neither was he a martyr who could inspire us to intensify our Lenten struggles for the sake of Christ’s love, but was a great theologian. Why is it of such importance to remember today, on the second Sunday of Lent, a person whose memory seemingly meshes so poorly with the Lenten season? Today let us try to show why the Holy Hierarch Gregory is important personally for each of us, especially right now, when we find ourselves in the midst of Great Lent.

Although Saint Gregory, who lived in the 14th century, left the world while still a young man and settled on Athos where he full-heartedly joined himself to the monastic life, circumstances forced him to defend the ancient and traditional teachings of Orthodox monasticism both with the written words and in oral debates. In those years there were people who rejected the idea that man is, through prayer and ascetic struggle, able to come to truly know God and commune with Him. They believed it impossible to know the essence or nature of God and that it is only possible to see, through rigorous study, some of God’s actions in our world.

The Holy Hierarch Gregory stood up in defense of Orthodoxy and responded that of course, it is impossible for man to know the essence of God, but that God makes Himself manifest in the world through His uncreated energies, or, in other words, through grace. Any person, not only a monastic, through prayer, good works, ascetic struggle, and the mysteries of the Church, can acquire grace and truly come to a knowledge of, to see, or to commune with God. Gregory Palamas offered the Transfiguration of the Lord as an example of this grace and explained that the apostles saw not a simple, earthly, created light, but an uncreated divine light, and that еhrough seeing it, they communed with God Himself.

A more contemporary follower of this ancient teaching was St. Seraphim of Sarov. Remember how during his conversation with Motovilov he shone with divine light and how it was impossible to gaze upon him. This is exactly what the Holy Hierarch Gregory taught. Probably all of you at some moment have felt the real presence of God in your lives. These types of events in our personal lives probably do not happen all that often and are are probably less dramatic than those which took place on Tabor or in the forests of Sarov, but nonetheless, they do happen, and that means that our personal spiritual experiences, despite our sins, can confirm the correctness of St. Gregory’s teaching.

The teachings about the uncreated light and that through prayer and ascetic struggle one can come to know God mesh particularly well with the days of Great Lent. It sometimes seems to us that our lenten struggles lead to nothing in particular, but this is not so. They prepare us for eternal life in the Heavenly Kingdom and can lead us to a real meeting with God even here on earth. Through the intersessions of the Holy Hierarch Gregory, the Holy Apostles, Saint Seraphim, and all those saints who through prayer and fasting communed with God’s grace, may we be vouchsafed, through our lenten struggle, to commune with the Divine Light of our risen Saviour on the feast of holy Pascha.

priest Alexis