Breaking the limits
“My child,” God replies, “I will never leave you be. I want to teach you how to surpass yourself, to encounter something more, something greater.
“It is good for you to be satisfied with any form of harmonious beauty. Yet you need to discover the painful tearing away from yourself that will allow you to behold what is truly sublime.
“This doesn’t mean you should disdain your intelligence. After all, I am the origin and the summit of all thought. I just do not want you to be forever bound by the slow deliberations of human reflection. I want to give you vision!
“Be obedient and pious – virtues that so many people mock today. But I do not want you to sleep away in some comfortable morality or piety. I want to inspire within you a sense of sacrifice!
“You know all too well the distance that separates you from your God. Just be careful not to measure that distance in order to keep to it, slumbering in an attitude of complacency, of least effort.
“My child, I want to reveal to you each day the truth and reality of God made man, your Lord of Love who took flesh, your flesh. For it is in taking upon himself human nature, without mixture or confusion, becoming a human person, that Love without limits breaks every limit, in the most sublime way possible.”
~Adapted from the Very Rev. John Breck, Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), October 2007, Article #8, Love Without Limits, by Archimandrite Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church”
When a soul is full of expectant longing,
and full of faith and love,
God considers it worthy to receive
“the power from on high,” ACTS 1:8, 2:1-3
which is the heavenly love of the spirit of God
and the heavenly fire of immortal life;
and when this happens, the soul truly enters
into the beauty of all love
and is liberated from its last bonds of evil.
—Makarios the Great
~ From John Anthony McGuckin, The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent, from the Desert Fathers and other Early Christian Contemplatives
