The Prayer of St. Ephraim - Part Three

 

O Lord and Master of my life,
Do not permit me the spirit of laziness, despair, lust of power, or idle talk.

But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Your servant.

From Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s Great Lent: 

Chastity! If one does not reduce this term, as is so often and erroneously done, only to its sexual connotations, it is understood as the positive counterpart of sloth. The exact and full translation of the Greek sofrosini and the Russian tselomudryie ought to be whole-mindedness. Sloth is, first of all, dissipation, the brokenness of our vision and energy, the inability to see the whole. Its opposite then is precisely wholeness. If we usually mean by chastity the virtue opposed to sexual depravity, it is because the broken character of our existence is nowhere better manifested than in sexual lust — the alienation of the body from the life and control of the spirit. Christ restores wholeness in us and He does so by restoring in us the true scale of values by leading us back to God.

The first and wonderful fruit of this wholeness or chastity is humility. We already spoke of it. It is above everything else the victory of truth in us, the elimination of all lies in which we usually live. Humility alone is capable of truth, of seeing and accepting things as they are and therefore of seeing God’s majesty and goodness and love in everything. This is why we are told that God gives grace to the humble and resists the proud.

Chastity

The word ‘chastity’ is used in English to render the Greek sophrosyne, which literally means ‘wisdom’, ‘integrity’. Chastity is not synonymous with celibacy: in monasticism the latter is only an element of the former. Chastity as wisdom and integrity, as life according to the Gospel and abstinence from passions and lusts, is also necessary in marriage. To live in chastity means to have one’s entire life oriented to God, to check every thought, word and deed against the Gospel’s standards.

~ Bp Hilarion Alfeyev, The Mystery of Faith 

The history of temperance is the history of sōphrosynē (σωφροσύνη). The cardinal virtue of moderation, self-knowledge, and self-restraint—sōphrosynē in Greek—took the Latin name temperantia in Cicero’s rhetorical and philosophical works, which set the style for later usage in the West. Sōphrosynē derives from the adjective sōphrōn: “of sound mind”—used at first to describe a person (either human or divine) who behaves in a way consistent with his nature or station or who shows good sense, as opposed to frivolity or even witlessness.

~ from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Humility

What salt is for any food, humility is for every virtue. To acquire it, a man must always think of himself with contrition, self-belittlement and painful self-judgment. But if we acquire it, it will make us sons of God.

~ St. Isaac of Syria

The mind that realizes it’s own weakness has discovered whence it might enter upon salvation and draw near to the light of knowledge and receive true wisdom which does not pass away with this age.

~ St. Gregory Palamas

This is the mark of Christianity—however much a man toils, and however many righteousnesses he performs, to feel that he has done nothing, and in fasting to say, “This is not fasting,” and in praying, “This is not prayer,” and in perseverance at prayer, “I have shown no perseverance; I am only just beginning to practice and to take pains”; and even if he is righteous before God, he should say, “I am not righteous, not I; I do not take pains, but only make a beginning every day.

~ St. Macarius the Great , c/o Gleanings