We have been focused on our walk during these weeks of Trinity season – on the believer’s pattern of life, how he conducts himself. The pattern for our life is not contained in a written code of precepts & rules covering every possible contingency of life, but in a walk. It is a walk patterned on the life of the Lord Jesus, and, as St. Paul states here, on the lives of His Saints: those who embody the sanctity of life which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit: “BRETHREN: Be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an example.”
As disciples, we continually place ourselves not under the judgment of human standards of behavior, but under the judgment of the Cross – the self-emptying example of our Lord, with its summons to a death to sin and a life unto righteousness, the life in the Holy Trinity.
Yet, while we have the examples of the holy ones who have gone before us and who walk amongst us, there are many other examples, St. Paul tells us – those who still walk according to the world, not led by the Spirit of God, but walking haphazardly, disorderly through this life; those who embrace the latest fads, who go along with the crowd. They are those who, because they are ignorant, or apathetic, or deceived about the fact that the hole in their lives is God-shaped, try to fill that longing for something they can’t quite define with all kinds of things that will never fill it.
We have a built-in desire which no natural happiness will satisfy – a desire, wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies, until confronted by the Gospel.
There is something self-defeating about fallen human desire, in that what is desired, once it is achieved, leaves the desire unsatisfied. Advertisers know this only too well.
This human desire, which is really the deep and bittersweet longing for the Paradise of communion with God which we lost in Eden, points beyond finite objects and finite persons. Though they may seem, on the surface to satisfy, they eventually prove incapable of doing so. In fact, our desire points through these objects and persons toward their only real fulifillment – in God Himself. This is what St. Paul refers to in Phil. 3:20:
For our conversation (our walk – our way of life) is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.
When we come to the realization that our true satisfaction lies in God, not our conceptions of Him, nor what we have been taught about Him, but in our personal experience of Him through the Scriptures and prayer and the Mysteries of His Church, we can surrender our conceptions and begin to walk in a new awareness: that while God is beyond our conceptions He is also present in every moment of our life, drawing us unto Himself, sometimes through the very things and people we often only consider distractions or nuisances in our path.
Through our life in the Spirit, we begin to relate to the things and the persons we encounter in this world in the proper way, walking in relation to them on the straight path that can lead us and them to the Father of all.
Our relation to the things of this world becomes no longer a dependency upon them to satisfy us, but as means of communion with God, and our interaction with those we meet is transformed by the Spirit of God. In letting go of things and people as objects, we are freed from the tyranny of that empty task of seeking fulfillment in them. God fills our emptiness, and we are no longer the slaves to that disappointment when things and others fail to fill us.
It is a difficult task – it is a part of our askesis – turning away from the self-serving modes of behavior we have embraced since the Fall, enabling us to serve rather than be served and to stop unconsciously demanding that things and others serve us and our needs. This is rendering unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and to God the things which are God’s. “The love of truth turns us to God; the truth of love turns us to the world.”
When we begin to look to God for His sufficiency, a work begins in us, a work that begins to transform us. We begin to focus no longer on how we are doing, on our walk, which is in itself is a form of self-centeredness, but instead begin to look to the encounters of our life as God-given – no longer as merely distractions or nuisances, but divine opportunities.
It is that crucifixion to which Jesus calls us when commanding us to take up our cross and follow Him – a daily crucifixion which begins the moment we arise and thank God for a new day in which to serve Him, drawing His blessing down upon our lives and upon all we encounter. It demands our vigilance, our intention, the energy of our will, and yet, the more we do it, the more it becomes habitual.
It is our life as salt & light in a world which abandons God and their only reason for living. We are called to call them to their Father; to introduce them to the love of God. To do so, we must be its home.
