The Catalog of Good Deeds

In the Orthodox Church, there is a battle chest available, providing us with practical ways to resist sin and to actually defeat it. We don't just tell people to "try harder". We also tell them HOW. We give them the weapons they need to wage war against sin, and to arise victorious

Everyone knows lust is bad. Everybody tells us to fight against it. But not everyone can tell us HOW to fight against lust successfully. We try, we fail, we try, we fail, we try again, and we fail again… and at some point, we realize that we need better advice than just "try harder".

Today, we will consider twelve practical ways for Christians to do battle against the sin of Lust. These methods are time-tested and trustworthy. And they actually work:

1) Don't let your fantasies write a check that your loins can't cash. If you are unmarried, do not fantasize about sex. Ever. Guard your thoughts. If you are married, but your spouse is currently inaccessible, then don't spend ten seconds thinking about sex. Don't even think about sex with your spouse. Guard your thoughts. If you are married, and your spouse is currently accessible, then have normal marital relations with your spouse regularly. This helps reduce the risk of illicit temptations.

2) Fight the birds. There is a saying: "You can't stop the birds from flying over your head, but you can stop them from building a nest in your hair." No thanks to the logismoi, the devil can do this to you without your consent. Sexual thoughts will unavoidably pop into your mind. This does not make you guilty.

What makes you guilty is your *response* to that initial thought. The moment an illicit sexual thought pops into your head, immediately "fight off the bird" by distracting yourself with something else, and give that other thing your full attention.

3) Not all distractions are created equal. Some activities (like jogging or weight lifting) take a lot of physical effort, but very little mental effort. Even while doing these things, your mind can still wander into bad places. Other activities (like writing a theological paper, solving a math problem, or reading a good book), so intensely involve your thoughts that you cannot easily keep thinking about two things at once. As long as you are focused on that math, that philosophy, or that puzzle, the thoughts of sex go away for a while. If you try jogging or working out and that doesn't help, then try distracting yourself with something more mentally intense.

4) Confess it immediately. Call someone godly who you trust (especially a priest), and say, "I'm getting tempted again." It is amazing how confession totally breaks the power of the Enemy, and makes him go away for a while.

5) Immediately go near other people. When you are standing in the presence of other people, having a conversation with them, it is amazing how easy it is to avoid illicitly pleasuring oneself.

6) Read the Scriptures, and the writings of Orthodox Christian Saints. Sure, you "already know what they say". But read it again. And again. And again. It helps.

7) Fast. Orthodox Saints agree that indulgence in food is directly connected with indulgence in lust. Thus, by regularly fasting from food for a certain period of time, we do battle against the sin of lust. If you practice asceticism and self-denial with your stomach, that will make it easier to practice asceticism with the other parts of your body.

8) Don't feed the beast. Again, guard your thoughts. Don't watch a movie or TV show that has even a little bit of fornication, or a little showing of scantily clad beauties. Even if you only see them for a few seconds, your brain will lock onto those images, and hold onto them for hours (or years). Then when you are alone and vulnerable, your brain will bring those pictures back to torment you and tempt you. Therefore, avoid these triggers to begin with.

9) Look at Orthodox Icons. Look directly at the cross. God works wonders through the cross, and He tells you, "Your sin may seem strong, but it is not stronger than THIS!" Other icons are good too, for the same purpose. Remember, porn is just the Devil's iconography. God is the one who invented icons, and He did so because images are very powerful. Fill your mind with divine images, and God can use those divine images to drive out the other images.

10) Be Faithful even if you don't Feel like it. It's not all about your feelings. You can show faithfulness, even when your emotions haven't caught up yet to where they should be. Manifest faithfulness long enough, and the feelings will eventually return. Emotions are meant to follow, not to lead.

11) Pray. Don't fight lust alone. Call upon Christ, call upon the Theotokos, call upon the angels, and call upon all the Saints to assist you. Prayer to the Saints works.

12) This Too Shall Pass. When the temptation hits in a strong way, a voice in your head will tell you, "You have already gone too far. It is impossible for this tension to go away now, unless you manually pleasure yourself." — This is a lie. — In fact, if you get up, walk around, pray, and forcibly occupy your mind with something else for several minutes, the tension will go away, and the urge will pass. Knowing this to be true can help you successfully win the battle.

By Fr. Joseph Gleason

Source: https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy/practical-ways-avoid-lust-answers-priest-russia-n1574

I sometimes cannot help asking myself three liturgical questions whenever I visit churches which serve the Liturgy in the “classic” pattern I learned in seminary — all of those questions quite rhetorical. I would like to share them here in a spirit of calm inquiry in the hope of provoking helpful discussion about things liturgical. My approach might be styled as motivated by a spirit of “liturgical reform” by some, or even “renovation” by the less sympathetic, but my aim is not so much reform or renovation as a return to patristic common sense. That is, at Liturgy I cannot help wondering what St. John Chrysostom would think about what we have done with the Liturgy ascribed to him, and concluding that he would be less than thrilled at some of the changes that have evolved over the years. This does not mean that we should take the liturgical scalpel to the texts as Vatican II has done with the Roman Mass. But it does mean that if certain aspects of our praxis would raise the eyebrows of a Chrysostomus redivivus, perhaps we should revisit that praxis.

Question one: why do the people say “Amen” to prayers that they have not heard? Where the practice obtains of saying the prayers silently, the priest will say (for example) the prayer after the Great Litany silently or quietly enough not to be heard by the congregation, and then raise his voice so that the final bit of the prayer can be heard: “for unto You are due all glory, honour, and worship: to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever unto ages of ages”. The congregation (or perhaps the choir, substituting for the congregation) then answers, “Amen”. The part that can be heard is not a prayer, or even a sentence, but simply a clause. The problem, of course, is that such a practice makes nonsense of the people’s response “Amen”. The word “amen” does not mean “the prayer is over”. As St. Justin Martyr explained long ago, it signifies “so be it” (in his Greek, genoito/ γενοιτο), and represents the people’s participation and assent to what has been said. This congregational assent transforms the utterance from being the private wish and prayer of the celebrant into being the corporate prayer of the gathered church. As Schmemann says (in his book The Eucharist), “With this word the ecclesial assembly concludes and, as it were, seals each prayer uttered by the celebrant, thereby expressing its own organic, responsible and conscious participation in each and every sacred action of the Church”. This presupposes, of course, that the prayer has been uttered and heard. Of course the people know (maybe) what the priest has said silently, but private knowledge is not the point. Liturgical worship is not private knowledge, but public utterance. As it is, the people are sealing not a prayer, but a clause, one with minimal content. The fact that this is not felt as odd reveals how greatly the role of the laity has been devalued and rendered liturgically irrelevant.

And sometimes it is worse than this. In places where the priest serves without a deacon, it is customary for him to intone the Great Litany, and then straightway intone the final clause of the prayer (the so-called exclamation or ekphonesis), and then, after the Amen has been sung, say the prayer quietly during the singing of the First Antiphon. (Presumably this is why that prayer is called in the liturgy books “The Prayer of the First Antiphon”.) This means that the people are saying their Amen not only to a prayer that they have not heard, but to a prayer that has not yet been said. Their “amen” and their role then is not only irrelevant, but nonsensical. I can imagine St. John Chrysostom raising his eyebrows.

The second question is this: why do we sometimes talk to people who aren’t there? I refer of course to catechumens in congregations where catechumens do not exist. Whether or not a congregation has catechumens within it, oftentimes the deacon and priest will assume they are there and talk to them. The deacon begins by addressing them, “Pray to the Lord, you catechumens!” and then goes on to pray for them. He will conclude by talking to them again, bidding them, “Bow your heads unto the Lord, you catechumens!” Then the priest prays a prayer, asking God to look down upon the catechumens “who have bowed their necks before” Him and unite them to His holy Church through baptism. After all this, the deacon again talks to them, ordering them twice to “depart” and again to not remain. But if no catechumens are there, who are priest and deacon talking to and about? Generally speaking, sane people do not talk to people who are not there as if they were.

If a congregation does have catechumens, it is reasonable for them to pray for these catechumens even when they are absent—but not to talk to them. In the case of absent catechumens, the church might reasonably pray for them in the third person, omitting the lines in which catechumens are addressed in the second person (e.g. “Pray to the Lord, you catechumens!”). And of course one would not tell people to leave who were not present in the first place. As it is, we are talking to catechumens who aren’t there, and then telling them to leave, when we would in fact want them to remain even if they were there. When Chrysostom had his catechumens dismissed, he expected them to actually leave. That is, his words had existential meaning and a corresponding reality in congregational life. He would wonder why we pretend we have catechumens when we don’t, why we tell them to pray and bow their heads to the Lord when they are not there, and why we tell them to leave when we expect them to stay for coffee hour, or at least until the end of the service.

Question three: why do we pretend things have happened when they haven’t? Here I refer to several things. In some congregations the deacon cries out before the Gospel, “Stand upright!” (or “Let us attend!”; the Greek is orthoi/ ορθοι) and in some places this is taken as the signal to kneel. We tell people to stand up straight, and then don’t bat an eye when they do the opposite. Their piety may be commendable (if a touch uncanonical), but it makes nonsense of the liturgical direction.

It is similar later on when the people are bidden to bow their heads to the Lord (i.e. bow their heads forward so that the priest may extend his hand over them to bless them), and everyone present remains with unbent neck—except, oddly enough, the priest who turns his back on them to bow his head to the Lord. Or, most strangely of all, the diaconal command, “In the fear of God and with faith, draw near!” This is, of course, not a suggestion, but a command to all those listening to come forward to receive Holy Communion. The liturgical text assumes that the people have obeyed and that everyone present drew near, for the next diaconal litany begins, “Stand upright! Having partaken of the divine, holy, most pure, immortal, heavenly, life-creating and awesome mysteries of Christ, let us worthily give thanks unto the Lord”. In some congregations hardly anyone comes forward to receive (I remember being in one packed Greek church of about 500 people, where my wife and I and four other people were the only communicants), but the deacon insists on chanting as if the congregation had partaken of the divine and holy mysteries. In all this we see a gap between what we say and what actually happens. Our liturgical words have been, if not exactly emptied of meaning, then certainly subject to an existential erosion of meaning. We no longer mean exactly what we say. Constantinople’s pastor, I suggest, would not be amused.

What to do? One sometimes hears that no one can do anything to close the gap between words and reality in the Liturgy without the pronouncements of an Ecumenical Council. Such a view of history is defective. As a matter of historical fact, liturgies evolved throughout the centuries through shared local variation, quite apart from the mandates of an Ecumenical Council. Such councils, whether “ecumenical” or “provincial”, only concerned themselves with liturgical details when abuses and problems became widespread enough to merit their attention. Thus the Council of Nicea ruled that deacons should not commune presbyters (canon 18), and that one should not kneel liturgically on Sundays, or during the Paschal season (canon 20). Thus the “Quinisext” Council ruled that the pre-Eucharistic fast should be maintained even on Holy Thursday (canon 29), and that milk and honey should not be offered on the altar (canon 57). In all these rulings the councils were not concerned to police every liturgical development that occurred (which was beyond their power even if they had wanted to), but to simply curb developments they felt were widespread abuses. Liturgy grew and developed because it was alive, and quite apart from conciliar decrees. (For a quick overview see Taft’s The Byzantine Rite: A Short History.) The bishops had the major share of decision-making and control because the bishops then (unlike now) were the local pastors. As such, of course they had liturgical authority over the churches in which they had the weekly burden of pastoral care.

For now, the best we can hope for is to at least start the discussion. It is not an unimportant one. And we should hold the discussion realizing that St. John Chrysostom is watching us with interest. He might not now get a vote in the proceedings, but his approval or disapproval should surely matter to us.

We invoke his name and his authority at the conclusion of every non-Lenten Liturgy, and we will one day have to face him and perhaps explain to him why it is we serve “his Liturgy” the way we do.

By Fr. Lawrence Farley

Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/nootherfoundation/three-liturgical-questions/

Some time ago, in the 1990s, our parish invited a local "tree surgeon," Leo M., to cut down a couple of dead trees in the back of the church property. He came and worked with his wife, Kathleen, doing the job quickly and with kindness to the rest of the surroundings. But they strongly resisted being paid, insisting on offering their work gratis to our church. They were non-Orthodox, and we wondered about the reason for such generosity. The reason, as we learned from them later, was to be found in something that happened a few years before, just after they had been married.

Both Leo and Kathleen were serious enthusiasts of mountaineering and rock climbing, and so for their honeymoon trip they decided to go to Alaska to bag the highest peak of North America, mount Denali (aka McKinley), 20,320 feet. While living at the camp at the foot of the mountain, they thoroughly prepared their expedition: talking to guides, studying the maps, checking the equipment, and waiting for a long stretch of good weather.

When they finally started their exciting, but extremely difficult, ascent, everything went just fine for a few days. But at the end of one day, on a narrow path, they met an old, strange-looking man in a long dark robe. He was walking in the opposite direction, down the mountain. In a friendly manner he greeted them and advised them to turn around and return to the base camp as quickly as possible because the weather was changing into a severe storm. Soon, he said, it will be very dangerous around here. And, as if in answer to their unasked question of how could he know such a thing, he explained that he was local and knew the climate very well. Leaving them surprised and uneasy, he continued on his way.

Some minutes later, after Leo and Kathleen made the wise decision to turn back, and then tried to recall the appearance of the old man, they realized that they hadn’t seen a backpack or any other hiking gear with him. How could he have made it up so high in the bare, rocky mountain in sub-zero temps, without any food or protection?!

A few days later, almost at the bottom of the mountain, they were indeed caught by a severe storm. They survived it, constantly in their minds thanking the old man who had warned them of the danger. A week later, still staying at the base camp, they learned that some other climbers, who happened to be at higher elevations than they were during the storm, never came back.

Then, as if in answer to their curiosity, Leo and Kathleen noticed something at the camp cafeteria. It was a picture of their rescuer, pinned on a bulletin board between some miscellaneous ads and photos of the mountain. They recognized him at a glance. When they asked the waiter for his name, he told them, " It's an Orthodox saint who lived in Alaska. His name is St. Herman." And the photo showed the icon of St. Herman from the Orthodox church nearby.

The Saint had told them the truth. He was indeed a local guy...

"By enduring the trials of nature, the storms' cold and wind together with hunger, thou didst kindle spiritual peace, warmth and satiety, and become unaffected by the elements, truly a heavenly man and earthly angel, O wondrous Herman; so wishing to honor thee as is meet we cry out: Rejoice, conqueror of nature's hardships! Rejoice, thou who wast arrayed in the virtues! ... Rejoice, O venerable Father Herman, adornment of Alaska and joy of all America! " (From Akathist to St Herman)

Matushka Galina Tregubov and Lee Browne-Beed

Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, Claremont, NH

Source: http://orthochristian.com/43717.html

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