“that we, being ready both in body and soul; may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done.”
The Church takes care to remind us that our eternal destiny is the matter of greatest importance; to hold before us the necessity of readiness to give our solemn account before the dread judgment seat of Christ; to impress us with the great value of being peacefully and penitently ready to make our last and most important journey. We are to take the business of dying seriously; to be “deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human Iife”.
We ought to be prepared to die, but that preparation doesn’t capture the whole meaning of the readiness our Lord requires of us. The prayer in the Collect is to be ready in body and soul so as to cheerfully accomplish those things that God would have us do. What is required is a readiness for all the demands of life, a preparation such that we will have the capacity to act rightly and cheerfully no matter what demands are made upon us: a readiness both for death AND life. This is what is demanded and it is this for which we pray.
Our Orthodox spiritual tradition, tested over centuries, is designed to do just that: to prepare us; to make us ready. First by the way of discipline of the will and character which has two sides, negative and positive: the purgation of what is sinful and evil, and the cultivation of what is virtuous and good.
At first, when the passions are still strong and liable to carry us away, we are governed and kept in order mainly by the fear of God, together with shame and repentance for past sin. This leads gradually to the building up of self-control, and patience under temptations and difficulties.
This, in turn, kindles hope. Drawn on by hope and guided by a growing experience, we set to work not merely to control, but to master and redirect the passions. It is a lengthy process; but gradually, if we are faithful and persistent in cooperating with the grace of God, the bodily appetites and desires are weakened and the soul purged, until at last we arrive at the goal, purity of heart, or freedom from the disordered passions. We remain untroubled and tranquil in all circumstances. The heart or will, no longer swayed by emotions or carried away by its own self-will, is sober, awake, attentive to God.
As we purge ourselves of passions, we are to grow in virtue. The seeds of all the virtues are latent in us from the start; they constitute the image of God in the soul, which sin has defaced but not destroyed. At Baptism, they are “fertilized” if you will, but we have to work to cultivate them, until at last, by constant practice, they become easier and more familiar to us. As passion weakens, virtue grows, and at length the separate virtues are united and summed up in the all-sufficient virtue of love. Love for God and love for neighbor become the ruling power in the heart. That is what we are made for.
But there is a parallel preparation with this discipline of the soul, helping it and helped on by it. This is the discipline of the mind, of the senses, the imagination and the intellect. Here too, there is a positive and a negative side.
The senses, memory and imagination must be guarded, not only against things which are a direct temptation to sin, but increasingly against everything which would engage the mind in passing interests when it should be set upon the unseen realities. The intellect, too has to be called away from all vain curiosity, from all learning or enquiry pursued merely for its own sake. Instead, we have to teach ourselves to see God in all things and all things in God. This is done by stages.
First we learn how to contemplate material things and the face of nature; we come to see these things with the eyes of the Psalmist, to whom they all declare the glory of God. Then we can begin to contemplate the glory of God in immaterial things, especially in the human soul which bears His image.
Next we go on to contemplate God’s actions in history, His judgments and His saving acts and the whole economy of our salvation, through the Holy Scriptures. The mind becomes penetrated with the meaning of these things, so that whatever we see or hear speaks to us of them. This is why we have the Christian Year, the liturgical cycle which brings these things before us in an ordered pattern which teaches us in and of itself. It is important to be in attendance of the Church’s feasts and fasts, to follow this instructive cycle. Each year is a microcosm of the whole of salvation history.
In time, a great simplification takes place. Instead of contemplating all these things separately and in detail, we come to see them all as summed up in Christ, from Whom and for Whom are all things, and in Whom is fulfilled the whole counsel of God toward us.
When the heart becomes pure and love reigns in it, then also the contemplation of Christ becomes habitual in the mind. The soul has become Christ-centered. It has truly “put on Christ” who is the wedding garment in our parable.
Readiness for the end, readiness for calamity, persecution, all begins with readiness for the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. And that begins with readiness for Holy Communion. We sometimes take it far too casually… not much is done to prepare…not much prayer, no fasting, no confession, not even much thought; yet all of this is part of our lifelong preparation and advance towards purity of heart. All the practices and disciplines of the Church are given by her Lord to make us Saints, but we have to put ourselves into the way of grace.
We sometimes simply stroll in and casually approach the fire of the holy Chalice, thinking that the Confiteor or the general confession we say together will somehow prepare us; but that is not a wedding garment suitable for this feast. While it is true that we need this food most of all, if we come to it casually, not discerning the Body as St. Paul says, it will burn us instead of warming our hearts and enlightening the mind of our soul. If we don’t come at all, we have simply removed ourselves from the way of grace. And each preparation for our Communion is a microcosm of the whole of our spiritual life.
Even if we don’t perceive it as such, each preparation for the reception of the Eucharist is a microcosm of the purgation of passion and the cultivation of virtue.
Each step towards God is a step away from the outer darkness, in which, in the words of St. Gregory the Great
“There shall gnash those teeth which here delighted in gluttony; there shall weep those eyes which here roamed in illicit desire; every member shall there have its peculiar punishment, which here was a slave to its peculiar vice.”
No one wants to be found unprepared at the great wedding feast, without the garment of Christ Himself. And so we seek in all we do, step by step, to purify our hearts that we may enter more deeply into our life in Him Who is our salvation, that we, being ready both in body and soul; may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done.