The Catalog of Good Deeds

Our life is filled with difficulties but after all, don’t they happen to us because of our own passions? Don’t they happen because of our “ifs”? Don’t they happen because of our self-righteous manner of speaking and acting? Because of our hypocrisy and falsehood? Don’t you agree with me? Nonetheless, self-knowledge and recognition of this fact will help us to love our neighbor, to become more forgiving, sincere, and genuine—basically, to become more human. If we become more human, we’ll become God-like, too. When we land, we shall fly. You have to stand on the ground firmly before you can take off and fly. First you make one sure-footed step, and then defy gravity. First you should become a real human and then a God-man.

It is a great achievement to be simple, humble, natural, and friendly. You should always make sure that you are who you are: a real person. We all should be striving for that.

An abbot from Mt. Athos used to share some memories of his life. That’s what he told us about the spiritual father he had when he was young, “One day, my spiritual father and I went to Athens by car. A pretty girl who wore fancy clothes crossed the street when our car stopped at the traffic lights. She made people feel uncomfortable. My spiritual father said, ‘Oh how many beautiful creatures of God are walking the streets! There are so many pretty girls in this world. They stir everyone up!’” The abbot continued his story: “Then I asked my spiritual father, ‘Geronda, are you aroused as well?’ ‘Of course, my dear. How can you not be aroused when you see such a girl? Everyone would.’ And I said to myself, ‘That’s why I love my Geronda! He’s a real deal. He is godly but also genuinely human.’ Later, in Athens, I met a woman who told me about her spiritual counselor, ‘My spiritual father has transcended everything. He is an Angel. He doesn’t touch the ground. Nothing bothers him.’” The old abbot added, “That’s what I responded, ‘No-no! I don’t want a Geronda like that. I prefer my Geronda. He is a simple man, a regular guy like any of us.’”

Here is an example of a spiritual father who you can approach without fear and terror. Saints say that this was the reason why Jesus left apostles and priests as his successors to hear confessions and to interact with the world. It was made so that the believers could feel comfortable, so that they wouldn’t be afraid of their leaders and knew that they are like us. They can understand us because they go through the same temptations. That’s right: whatever you do, I do the same.

The story that I’ve mentioned was shared with me by the abbot of the Docheiariou Monastery Father Gregory, who died a couple of weeks ago. His spiritual father, who admitted his own temptations, was the recently-canonized Saint Amphilochius of Patmos.

The real people: the sinners and the zealots, the repentant, the saints who are constantly asking for God’s mercy and live honestly and authentically, with all it entails… They don’t shock me. I’m not especially fond of them, and still they don’t make me nervous. On the contrary, they make me feel relieved, hopeful, and inspired to do good and avoid sanctimony. O Lord have mercy on us thanks to the prayers and the intercession of your saints!

Fragment of a book by the Archimandrite Andrew (Konanos)

"Marriage and Its Problems"

Translated by the Catalog of Good Deeds

Source: https://pravlife.org/ru/content/arhim-andrey-konanos-o-duhovnoy-zhizni-bez-licemernoy-svyatosti

Here’s something I hear from time to time: “I’d like to join the Orthodox Church, but I visited a local church and it just felt dead.”

When I hear this it’s about Orthodox churches, but that needn’t be the case. It could be any church or denomination; it might sound good on paper, but the local church on Sunday morning feels empty and drained.

It’s tempting to say, “That shouldn’t make any difference. Focus on your own prayer life.” But, actually, I know what these people mean. Sometimes, when you visit a church, something just feels “off.” It makes you really eager to get out of there.

I’ve puzzled over what this is, exactly. It seems like, anywhere the same people gather regularly—a school, an office, a church—a hard-to-define quality develops, an atmosphere or a mood. Even though I know that quality or mood shouldn’t affect me, it does. I can’t just ignore it.

The first impulse, when that happens, is to get out of there, and look for a church that feels more alive. But there’s another possibility: a “dead” church can be revived. There are things you can do to bring a church, of whatever denomination, to life.

Go back to that moment when you were looking around the congregation and feeling dismayed. It’s been said that 20 per cent of the people in a church do 80 per cent of the work. When you first visit a church, most of what you see will naturally be that 80 per cent. It seems like they aren’t really engaged with worship; maybe, you think, they’re there for social reasons, or just out of habit.

But the 20 per cent whose faith is strong, the ones who pray and read the Bible, who sincerely seek the Lord—they’re there too; they’re just not as visible. In every congregation, there is a hidden “starter set” of committed people. Your task is to find them, band together with them, and begin to fan the flame.

You’ll find, no doubt, that the pastor is on your side. A pastor’s life isn’t easy, and it doesn’t pay well, either. People take up the calling despite this because they sincerely want to help others deepen and strengthen their faith. If things feel “off” in church, if there’s a vacant feeling, a rattling-around chill, it not because that’s how the pastor likes it. So, if you want to understand this church, listen to him. He knows the people in the congregation better than anyone else does, and he knows what prayer groups or book studies have been effective in the past.

Now, where are you going to find these more-committed people? One place is mid-week services. People who take the trouble to go to church when it isn’t Sunday morning probably have a motivation similar to yours.

Say you notice somebody who comes regularly to mid-week services, or arrives early on Sundays and stays late, or carries a well-worn Bible (or prayer rope, in an Orthodox church)—any kind of tip-off. Take the initiative and make contact. On Sunday, look around for them during coffee hour, and go over and start a conversation. Find out if you are reading the same books, or mention something in worship that you found meaningful. Build bridges.

This next part might be shocking, so brace yourself: these people might not be the same age you are. They might not dress in ways you find attractive. They might not read as much as you do, or not read the same things. If you walk with them to their car, you might see a bumper-sticker you don’t like.

Don’t let these things throw you off. As you become fond of someone, the very things that were initially off-putting can transform and become endearing.

It’s likely that some of these people will literally be little old ladies. That’s OK. Someone who’s had decades of experience with prayer might be just what you need in your life right now. Also, sometimes old ladies turn out to be interesting. I know because I am one.

If you attend a liturgical church, you can also remind yourself that, even if the church’s atmosphere dismays you, you are still receiving communion. The Prophet Elijah, alone in the wilderness, was sustained by ravens who brought him bread. In the Divine Liturgy, the Holy Spirit gives you the Bread of Life; ultimately, that’s all you need.

Remember also that bitter, discouraged Elijah was less alone than he thought he was. He complained that he was the only faithful person remaining in the land, and the Lord revealed that there were another 7000 who had never abandoned the faith.

Here’s another practical suggestion: Pray through the church directory, a page or two every day. When you get to the end, start over. Invite your church-friends to do the same, praying for each person by name. Don’t pray for God to change them; just call them to mind, remembering them, as St. Paul did (“I remember you constantly in my prayers,” 2 Timothy 1:3; “I remember you in my prayers,” Philemon 1:4). Just lift them up before the Lord; the Lord knows better than you do what they need.

If you know of specific needs, for healing perhaps, of course you can include those requests. Let the pastor know that you and your friends are glad to pray for any needs he thinks it right to share.

This habit of praying through the directory has the practical benefit of teaching you the names of everyone in the church. It will help you remember who’s married to whom, which kids go with which families, and so on.

In time, this habit of praying for all the congregation by name will change something inside of you. The worshipers will stop seeming like a mass of indistinguishable faces. They will be revealed instead as what they always were: unique individuals, each of whom is thoroughly known and loved by Christ. The congregation is not a block of stone but a mosaic, composed of countless faces.

That’s so often the way with spiritual growth: you realize something was true all the time. Christ was already present, already working in these lives, long before you walked in the door. He was already loving them and calling them into a closer relationship with himself. And, fortunately, they’re people who are already in the habit of coming to church. A line in a hymn, a scripture reading, a sermon illustration, may be just the spark they need. Your role is to pray.

There probably are more prayerful and faithful people in the congregation than you’ve been able to see. Superficial factors, like clothing and age, may be rendering them invisible to you. In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a senior devil teaches a young devil how to corrupt his “patient.” Although the young man in question has started going to church, it’s not necessarily a lost cause, because of his preconceptions about what the Church should look like.

When he gets to his pew and looks round him, he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew.

It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on [God the Father’s] side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to [the Devil], is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

As time passes, and church members who are prayerful and intentional find each other, a kind of chemical change takes place. They find that they constitute a living community within the congregation. They sense that they are upheld by each other’s prayers. When they come to worship, the do so prepared to love and serve God.

A quality of warmth and illumination accompanies them, and it begins to pervade worship. This is something others can sense—even those people you’d written off. Christ is Life, and everyone seeks life. The warmth of faith is attractive in the sense that a magnet is attractive, and it draws people forward. You are moving toward a tipping point, in which the Light of Christ becomes so perceptible that the feeling of worship on Sunday morning is transformed.

If you think a congregation is “dead,” your only option is not to go somewhere else. Where Christ is, there is resurrection. By finding and befriending other church members who are spiritually strong, by following the pastor’s vision, and by giving prayer support to the work God is already doing in worshippers’ lives, you can help bring a congregation to life.

By Frederica Mathewes-Green

Source: http://frederica.com/writings/how-to-revive-a-dead-church.html

We made a video about the construction of the Church in honor of Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco in the fall of 2015. Three years later, a lot of tasks have been done. You could have followed all construction stages on a dedicated page in the Ministry section of our blog. Now, let us share the good news!

The construction of the church is over. A carved wooden cross has been erected. Interior finishing works are coming to an end. The iconostasis has been set up, with some icons already painted. The choir loft has been equipped. Heating and ventilation systems have been checked. Sound amplifiers have been mounted. Adjacent territory has been improved. An access ramp leading to the entrance of the church has been built; combined with low threshold, it makes the church accessible for the less able. Currently, we at St. Elisabeth Convent are getting ready for the Great Consecration of the church. We celebrate some divine offices in St. John of Shanghai Church and hold meetings with the faithful in its basement.

Let us talk about the construction in a greater detail. Initially, the church was planned to be built in a Belarusian style but then God sent us an opportunity to use timber, which led our architects to change their plans. Why did they decide to build the church in a different style? Probably, because many people, especially Christians, are always keen on finding a connection with the ancient time-honored tradition. We wanted this church to bring to mind some of the best architectural masterpieces of the Russian North, that is, Kizhi churches. A lot has been written about that amazing place. The churches of Kizhi architectural ensemble (which is a UNESCO world heritage site, by the way) combine awe-inspiring magnificence, ascetic look, and immanent thrust toward God, which doesn’t tolerate anything excessive or meaningless.

The sill of the church is made of oak, the beams that support the spiked roof are made of larch. The walls are made of our Belarusian pine wood. Some of the logs are as thick as 17 inches! Oak dowels were pushed into the logs in a chequered pattern. The logs are secured with grooves cut in both ends of each log, providing tightly-sealed corners. The art of the roofers is equally impressive: the cylindrical and onion-like shapes are decorated with curved diamond-shaped copper tiles of various shapes. The inclines are covered with corrugated metal sheets. All places where the roof abuts against the wooden walls are thoroughly trimmed.

All interior details have unique design: the workshops of our Convent and private contractors did a really great job! For instance, the woodwork shop of St. Elisabeth Convent made the exterior decorations of the church, the iconostasis frame, and the furniture. Our blacksmith’s shop made the choros (the church chandelier) and all other forged items. Our glass workshop made stained glass windows for this church. Our gilders decorated the domes and the crosses. Our icon painting workshop designed and painted the icons.

The construction of a church has always been a serious and very challenging endeavor. The faithful from all walks of life have always joined their efforts to assist in this good cause. Thank God, we now have another place where the greatest Mystery of the Eucharist occurs. We’ve finally built another church where people will have communion with God, thanks to your ongoing support and prayers. We are immensely grateful to you. May God bless you! We will be happy to meet you in St. John of Shanghai Church!

By Sergey Losev,

The Senior Brother
at the Catalog of Good Deeds

The Catalog Of Good Deeds, 2018

I read the Bible through the first time when I was in high school. I was part of a youth group that made it a project. We made a big chart with all of the books of the Bible in columns on it with everyone’s names at the side and each Sunday we would check off whatever books (or parts of books) we had read during that week. Since my main social reality in high school was with my Church friends and not my school friends, it worked well for me to read my Bible during my lunch break at school most days. And although at that time I had the rather competitive atmosphere of my youth group providing most of my motivation to read the Bible diligently, I also thought it was a good idea. After all, if I was going to be a Christian, I figured, then I should read the Christian holy book through at least once in my lifetime.

However, there was also another, deeper motivation. I wanted to know God better and I wanted to be able to help others know God too. At some deep level, this also was my motivation–even though I experienced it faintly at that time and perhaps I couldn’t even identify that as a motivation at the beginning. However, as time went on, as I kept reading the Bible, my awareness of that deeper motivation continued to grow. But it took time. And that is what I want to talk about today. In those early days of diligent Bible reading, I discovered that often verses or ideas I had encountered several months earlier in my reading would suddenly take on life for me as I read other passages or as I encountered new situations in my life.

When I say diligent Bible reading, I am distinguishing it from either casual Bible reading (reading a little here or there when I felt like it) or crisis Bible reading (opening the Bible hoping to be divinely guided to a verse that spoke directly to a crises I was experiencing in my life at that moment). There is nothing wrong, I think, with reading the Bible casually or in a crisis; but if we are really going to grow, not only in our knowledge of the Bible as a text, but also to grow in our knowledge of God through the holy text, then we have to devote ourselves to diligence in reading. And while a casual reader might often find something interesting or beautiful to think about whenever she picked up the Bible; and while, in His mercy, God usually provide some help, guidance or comfort to anyone who looks to Him for help by picking up and reading a Bible in a time of crisis, yet reading the Bible diligently does not usually produce immediate results.

As those who have read the Bible diligently know, especially in the early years, you can go for months at a time reading faithfully and not encountering anything that strikes you as particularly beautiful, interesting, or divinely inspired. Unlike casual reading and crisis reading, the desired results are not so immediate, but they are longer lasting. And this makes sense, even on a purely literary level. To really appreciate a very well written novel, for example, you often have to read it twice or more. The first time I read The Karamozov Brothers by Dostoyevsky, I appreciated some bits, but I had no idea what was going on. Ten years later, when I reread it, I got the plot and saw some of the spiritual aspects of the novel thus appreciating the novel so much more. Ten years after that, on my third reading (now in my forties), I saw Dostoyevsky’s profound grasp of human psychology and was in awe of his ability portray with accurate detail and compassion (and mostly it is the compassion that awed me) the inner lives of the several very different characters in the novel. Now I am sure that I was able to see these things in my forties because of my own life experience, but if I had not already been familiar with the novel, I almost certainly would not have been able to have gained so much from reading it at that point in my life.

But if this principle of diligence bearing fruit is true at a merely literary level, it is even more profoundly true on a spiritual level. In homily 25 of St. Isaac the Syrian’s Ascetical Homilies, the saint talks about this very experience in the spiritual life as it applies to prayer. St. Isaac says:

“It is a sign of the beginning of a man’s recovery from his [spiritual] illness when he desires hidden [i.e. spiritual] things. There is, however, a delay until he witnesses true health.”

When a person begins to be healed of spiritual illness, when he or she begins to actually repent and draw near to God; then the sign that this is really taking place, according to St. Isaac, is that the person will also begin to desire spiritual, or hidden, things. This desire for hidden things is then the motivation that empowers one to diligently pursue a spiritual life. This pursuit of the spiritual life can take various forms depending on one’s personality, calling and circumstances in life. In my case, as a young man in a Protestant context, this pursuit of God took the form of Bible reading. In contrast, my wife, or the young woman who would become my wife, who was in the same high school youth group, diligently sought God in ways that worked well for her. Although she also did her fair share of Bible reading, that wasn’t where she found life in her pursuit of God. Bonnie is an artist, and since there was very little room for artistic expression in the frigid iconoclastic air of the Protestant context we found ourselves in, Bonnie found life in the diligent pursuit of God through music: playing the guitar and writing songs that were really more like prayers than songs.

And just as I had to slog through Leviticus and the prophecy of Habakuk, getting very little immediate edification for my effort, Bonnie had to slog through music theory (“the circle of fifths,” I think, is what she called her tedium). Discipline and diligence are necessary if one is going to pursue God whether it is through prayer or reading or painting or music. The hidden things in our heart, the spiritual treasures of a relationship with God, do not reveal themselves to the lazy. St. Isaac names the two enemies that keep us from acquiring the spiritual treasure we seek. These are “tedium” and “despondency.” “Tedium” refers to what we might nowadays call the “boring” nature of what we are doing. Let’s face it, until you know something about the history of Israel and the spiritual interpretation of the Old Testament, most of the Old Testament is just plain boring. But the only way to learn is to begin to read. You have to pass through the boredom to the life. The same thing is true with beginning a prayer rule or learning music theory or basic drawing and brush strokes. You have to be faithful through the tedium before you can start to enjoy the fruit of life in what you are doing.

“Despondency” refers to my own downward spirals, my own inability to motivate myself, my own struggle with bad days or weeks or months. When I am despondent, I just cannot motivate myself to do what I need to do, nor even, sometimes, what I want to do. When I struggle with despondency, it seems like it takes a herculean effort for me just to get my Bible open and to read the same few verses over and over again, as though my mind has been greased and every word slides right off. Or I have to force myself with all my might just to light the vigil lamp in my icon corner, open my prayer book and stand there just whimpering for a few minutes. In times like these when I struggle with despondency, a saying from my days of athletic training has helped me a great deal: “Something is always better than nothing.” To open my Bible is itself a prayer. To read the same verses over and over again making no sense out of it: this too is prayer. To light a vigil lamp is a prayer. To stand before an icon and just whimper, that too is prayer. Something is always better than nothing.

St. Isaac advises us that when we find ourselves confronting either tedium or despondency, we need to call to mind why we are doing what we are doing. Why do I pray? Why do I read my Bible? Why do I do any spiritual discipline that I do? I do it because I desire the hidden, spiritual realities. I desire to know God. St. Isaac tells us that we must allow this desire to generate expectation in us: expectation that God will come to my aid, expectation that soon something hidden will indeed be revealed to me; expectation that this simple act of being diligent and hanging in there will indeed bear fruit.

Jesus loved agricultural metaphors. He sure used a lot of them. A sower sows, farmer plants and the crop grows. The farmer labors in hope, in expectation. Even though there is nothing he can do to hurry the crop along, the farmer knows that if he keeps at it, eventually he will have more fruit than he will know what to do with it all. But he has to hang in there. There is a delay, as St. Isaac tells us, between the beginning of our efforts in spiritual growth, between our desire to enter into the hidden things of our heart, and the time when we do actually begin to enjoy the fruit of our labor, what St. Isaac calls the witness of true spiritual health. And the meat, you might say, that we have to sustain us during this long growing seasons, through the tedium of weeding and through the droughts of despondency, the food that will sustain us during these sometimes dry and sometimes boring times, this food is expectation, expectation that we will indeed, if we do not give up, come to see and know the hidden things of our hearts, the hidden things of God and His kingdom.

By Fr. Michael Gillis

Source: http://holynativity.blogspot.com/2015/03/fighting-boredom-and-despondency.html

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About the Church in Honor of Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco

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