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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!
Today is the fourth Sunday of Great Lent. This day is devoted to memory of Saint John of the Ladder. John of the Ladder was a great hermit, a great monk of Sinai monastery. He lived in the sixth century and by request of his brethren monks, wrote an instruction which is called the Ladder of Paradise. In this work he described the steps of man ascending to God, the degrees of spiritual perfection.
This book begins with the following words, “God is life and salvation for all whom is given free will as a gift”. We, people, are given free will as a gift. And so at each moment of our life we choose where we are going. Are we ascending to God or going down?
One needn’t do any efforts to go down. But to ascend to God one must do constant efforts. John of the Ladder tells us a lot and in detail about these efforts, what they consist of, and what they must be.
And today I’d like to tell, as an example, about two things which are especially characteristic for people. About struggle with wrath and grief, about how these two passions defeat us.
Wrath as flame can burn the soul of a man in a minute. And grief, on the contrary, as a little grey mouse will eat away our heart till there is anything left from it. But the reason of both wrath and grief often come to us because of misunderstanding arising among people. We meet a man whom we may consider to be our friend, and suddenly he turns out to be an enemy. And it happens so because he tells about us such things in which we don’t find any truth. And as a result we either get angry with this man or become sad.
But the situation can be quite different. Sometimes we ourselves notice in our neighbor qualities which cause great hostility in us. And again we either become sad or get angry with this man. What shall we do with such feelings? First of all I think we must understand that what we are spoken about has nothing really to do with us. People praise us when we don’t deserve it. People also scold us when we don’t deserve it. The point is not what people tell about us. The point is that it is we ourselves who see in other people features which we want to notice. And this is very important because other people for us are like a mirror in which we can see ourselves.
There is such a spiritual rule that if anything in another man especially irritates and even anger you, then it is your own weak feature. You saw this feature in another man and hated it most of all. Because it is not his, but your weakness. It is you who must eliminate this weakness, learn to struggle with it.
We are told: love your neighbor and love your enemy. We always think: how can we love our enemy? Really, we can love our enemy only when we understand that the worst feature in our enemy is our own bad feature. And it is this that makes us angry or sad. So, in fact we don’t like to stand in front of a mirror. We agree to stand in front of a mirror only when we are thankful and fine.
Let’s remember that we love our neighbor, must love him not only because he is an image of God but because he has an image of ourselves.
On these days we are making our way to Golgotha as the Word of God ascended Golgotha and the Love of God ascended Golgotha too. And we are going with God and learn this great love on days of Great Lent. Amen.