Talking Tuesday: The Sweetness of Grace

I've mentioned a few times that I'm reading Mat. Constantina Palmer's latest book, The Sweetness of Grace this Lent.  It is very good!  It is a collection of stories about monastics and ordinary Orthodox Christians living all over the world.  It is a nice follow-on to her first book, The Scent of Holiness (also excellent).

image via (I believe this is by the hand of Fr. Paul Drozdowski)

I'm about half-way through the book, and several things stood out to me enough to dog-ear the pages, and I thought I'd share one or two here.  I thought this passage was particularly apt as we enter the fifth week of Great Lent, and the renewal of our fasting and preparation for the glorious feast of Pascha.

"After we returned to Canada from Greece, Fr. John [her husband] was ordained to the holy priesthood.  However, he was required to return to Thessaloniki for one month to defend his doctoral dissertation.  During his time in Greece, he went to visit dear friends of ours (a priest and his family) who live and serve the Church in a village in the mountains.  While there, Fr. John co-celebrated the Divine Liturgy.

During the service of Proskomidi, our friend, a more senior priest, noticed that Fr. John had turned the diskos toward himself to make cutting and preparing the prosfora loaf for use in the Divine Liturgy a little easier.  Seeing this, the priest immediately came over and rebuked him heavily for his audacity.  Of course, this shook Fr. John up a great deal, but once he settled down and finished the Proskomidi, the priest approached him again.  "The whole purpose of the Christian life," he instructed Fr. John, "is conforming ourselves to Christ, not dragging Christ to us."

When Fr. John came home, he told me about this experience.  I knew it must have had a very great impact on him for him to relay it to me, since he quite often prefers to ponder things in his heart rather than share every experience with his wife.  Since that experience, he has employed this story as an example for the greater context of our Christian life: our sins and passions are the manifestation of us turning things toward ourselves in order to appease our will, our insatiable desires, and even at times our wicked intentions.  But Christianity is about conforming to Christ, to His commandments, and taking the necessary steps toward turning ourselves away from the world, from the easy path that leads to the wide gate--from sin and the passions, in other words--and toward the straight and narrow path that leads to life (Matt. 7:14).  May God direct our steps!"

~Constantina R. Palmer, The Sweetness of Grace: Stories of Christian Trial and Victory. Chesterton, IN: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2017, pp 105-106.