“There was an evening and a morning…”
No less than six times in the first chapter of the first sacred book of the Hebrews, God is represented creating the days of the week and setting evening as the time at which the day begins.
The way people today count time is not Your way, O Lord. Instinctively, they tend to start the day with morning. The day begins with the pale light of daybreak. Then comes the joy of dawn, the rising of the sun, the splendor of noonday, the sunset and shadows of evening, the sadness of the twilight hours, and finally the tangible tragedy and the terrors of darkness.
With You, O Lord, it is very different. You declare that first there was evening, and only then did morning appear.
Your day begins in the evening hours, in nocturnal obscurity. Then it progresses toward morning, toward the light, toward the incandescence of the Burning Bush and of the midday sun.
Thus it is with our love. It always begins in obscurity, in weakness, uncertain and threatened. Gradually it progresses in strength towards the brilliance of Love without limits.
Without doubt, the evening will return once again. Yet an immense gulf separates the vision of a day declining toward night, from the image of a day that rises toward morning.
What truly matters, O Lord, is the meaning You attribute to the movement that marks each day. You make a symbol of the order it follows, from darkness to light. From the beginning of Creation, You have directed the evolution of time toward Your own luminous fullness. You guide us toward the Morning.
O Lord, grant me to be more conscious of the movement inherent in my days. Despite the obscurities that can darken each moment, grant me an intuition and an unceasing movement toward the rising of the Sun of Love. Open wide the door of my hope to the approaching Day of Your Kingdom, a Day that will know no evening.
~Adapted from the Very Rev. John Breck, Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), May 2007, Article #6, Love Without Limits, by Archimandrite Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church”
“Pray night and day. Pray when you are happy and pray when you are sad. Pray with fear and trembling, and with a watchful and vigilant mind, that your prayer might be acceptable to the Lord; for as scripture says: ‘The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their appeal.’” –Theodoros the Ascetic
From John Anthony McGuckin, The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent, from the Desert Fathers and other Early Christian Contemplatives
