Well, if my New Year’s Resolution had started off with better church attendance, I’d have been thwarted right off the bat. More snow fell last night and this morning, and our intended trip to church became a very quick trip with a very slow U-turn in it. Not an entirely wasted effort, because if I had stayed in the house, I wouldn’t have gotten to see that it was so cold out that the snow didn’t melt at all after it landed. And so you could make out individual shapes of snowflakes on the windshield. It’s the kind of thing that makes me squeal, and then grab the camera to see if there’s any way to capture it. You sort of can … and that’ll have to do.

And I have no way to segue from the weather report to my boring little observation about patristic reading, other than to say that I had been meaning to blog this and now have a Sunday morning unexpectedly free.

Perhaps I can make a few gentle readers feel like they’ve gotten a break as well if I say that I’m not going to spout rah-rah cheers for reading all the saints, ascetics, homileticians, theologians, hierarchs, confessors and Church fathers that you can get your hands on in 2010. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s not the whole thing. Or, as some very gifted spiritual elders advised:

One who is taking care for his salvation should not at all ask [the Elders, i.e., read Patristic books] for the acquiring only of knowledge … but it is most fitting to ask about the passions and … how to be saved; for this is necessary and leads to salvation.

Just as one clothed in beggarly garments might see himself in sleep as a rich man, but on waking from sleep sees himself poor and naked, so also those who deliberate about the spiritual life seem to speak logically, but inasmuch as that of which they speak is not verified in the mind by any kind of experience, power and confirmation, they remain in a kind of fantasy.

These days, when this reading is available in any of our Orthodox bookstores, the danger might be even greater. We get so impatient to have the elevated, transcendent state that we read about, and we can feel so far above everyone else in these deplorable times, that we sort of gloss over the most important part. And I could reach for a whole lot more quotes to say what that most important part is, but perhaps nothing says it as succinctly as St. Seraphim of Sarov did to Motovilov: “The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.” (**)
The two quotes I started with came from Ss. Barsanuphius and John, and from St. Marcarius. I’ll mention that the book the quotes came from was a very good collection called “Guidance Toward Spiritual Life,(***)” translated and edited by Fr. Seraphim Rose. But since even this book might be exactly the type of reading that is being referred to, we’ll all get to just take things one step at a time, right? Personally, if I read a lot less of this sort of thing in 2010 but digested a lot more of what I read and let it aid me every day, I’d have an incredible year ahead.

And just in case I can’t manage that, I’ll spread a little joy with Greg’s picture of our snowy morning.