Second Sunday of Lent; St Gregory Palamas; St Raphael Bishop of Brooklyn

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

"O God, my God, unto thee I arise early at dawn. My soul has thirsted for thee; how often my flesh has longed for thee in a land barren and untrodden and unwatered. So in the sanctuary have I appeared before thee to see thy power and thy glory. As with marrow and fatness let my soul be filled, and with lips of rejoicing shall my mouth praise thee."

Last week, with the Triumph of Orthodoxy, we were invited to consider the power and glory that is our salvation. This week, we are invited to come to know the One who is that salvation itself. And today, the Gospel shows us exactly how we are to approach Him and how He is to be known.

An abbot once related a remarkable story. He had a spiritual daughter who suffered from severe and debilitating migraines, such that she was often unable to attend divine services. Nevertheless, she was zealous and determined. One Lenten season, she asked her spiritual father for an ambitious prayer rule. With some reluctance, he agreed.

She felt enthusiasm and excitement for prayer swell within her. The first week, she was successful. But by the second, she felt her prayer dry up. And by the third, she could hardly bring herself to stand in her icon corner. Every week she would call her spiritual father, but soon she was filled with dread. She was nervous about making the phone call because of her own embarrassment. Nevertheless, she picked up the phone, made the call, and relayed to him everything: the dryness she felt, her lack of energy, her failure, how she occupied her time in idleness and meaningless pursuits, and how she didn't feel anything at prayer at all.

After hearing all of this, to her surprise, her spiritual father told her to go and receive the Holy Mysteries. The following Sunday, as she drove to church, she felt the heaviness of her laziness and the sluggishness that accompanied her loss of zeal. She stood at Liturgy feeling empty and even apprehensive to approach the Mysteries, as she had not prepared as she would have liked.

Days later, she called her spiritual father as usual. "Well," he asked, "did you feel anything?" "No," she said. He asked again, "What did you feel in the hours after Liturgy?" "I didn't really feel anything at all," she responded. "In fact, I can hardly even account for any thought that may have popped into my mind." "There it is," he replied. "That was it."

Some time later, she realized that her migraines had ceased that very day, and it had happened so subtly that it completely escaped her attention.

Elijah once beheld a vision of God while peering from a cave. He was told that the Lord would pass by. There was a great wind, such that it shook and destroyed rocks, but the Lord was not in the wind. There was a great earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. There was a great fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. Finally, there came a soft and still voice, and it was the voice of God.

To certain men who focused entirely on external and outward acts of piety while ignoring their inner meaning, the Lord once said, "A wicked and adulterous generation seeks a sign." True expressions of holiness and prayer are known by silence and emptiness of self.

The Apostle Paul similarly once wrote, "Some people say his letters are profound and strong, but his physical presence is weak and his speech worthless. Let such people consider this: that what we are in word by letters when we are absent, we are exactly the same in action when we are present."

The example which we are given today of the paralytic is one in which a man presents himself before God in all of his weakness. He, of himself, has no works or accomplishments to boast of, being unable to even move. Yet because of his hope and his faith in Christ, he was healed.

How often in the course of the Great and Holy Fast we set out to accomplish many things. We hope to be lifted up, to feel exalted. Perhaps we are initially filled with a certain zeal and excitement. And yet, so often we do not experience what we had hoped, and perhaps our goals and ambitions are denied to us altogether. But within this outward fall, we in fact experience an inward victory.

St. Theophan the Recluse once aptly remarked that everybody wants to be with the Lord and experience His light and His glory at His Transfiguration, but nobody wants to be with Him in Gethsemane. In our failures, we learn to approach prayer devoid of any ambition or self-reliance, acquiring true hope and confidence in God alone. Thereby we come to see beyond or between the things of this world towards the truth that they express and the beauty of their source. As our Father among the saints, Gregory Palamas, tells us, "Humility is the chariot in which the ascent to God is made."

Before we are able to ascend to the heights of prayer, we must first descend into the silent chamber of humility. May we keep the example of the paralytic in mind as we continue our pilgrimage to the Cross. The straight and narrow path that we now walk in Great and Holy Lent is a path of humility, a path walked upon by the Savior himself. As we ever so slowly approach Golgotha with Him, experiencing the humiliation of the Cross and the burden of our sins, may we bear in mind how quickly the paralytic was raised from his bed of sickness and how swift was the passage from the Cross and the Tomb to the Resurrection.

As we heard last night, "I am grievously paralyzed in the multitude of sins and wrongful deeds. As you raised up the paralytic of old, raise up my soul by your divine guidance that I may cry out, 'Glory to your power, O compassionate Christ!'" Amen.