Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Each year, beloved, on this particular Sunday, we listen to the epistle reading from Romans which was the text that Augustine picked up and read when he heard the voice of the child: “Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege. Take up and read.” And he opened a book at random and read this text, and it led to the transformation of Western Europe. The scales fell from his eyes. Every year Fr. Seraphim Rose read the Confessions of St. Augustine during Lent. That’s one book I definitely can recommend for lenten reading. And if you’re sufficiently inspired by that, you can go on to his commentary on the Gospel of John, his sermons on the psalms, and especially the great work, one of the great works of Western civilization, The City of God. So much for Augustine. Well, no, actually he appears later on in my sermon.

Today’s sermon is to prepare for the season that begins with the vespers prokeimenon this evening. Monday begins at the prokeimenon of vespers Sunday night. The custom has lately arisen among Orthodox Christians—I say “lately”; perhaps a century or so, which is yesterday in Orthodoxy—to call this season by the word “Lent,” a shortened form of the old English word, “lencten,” meaning spring season. This use is entirely unique to English.

In traditional Orthodox usage, the name of the season emphasizes fasting. Thus we have Postul Mare in Romanian, Megali Sarakosti in Greek, and Velikiy Post in Russian. I tried to do the Arabic; the sounds did not seem to match the letters, so I let it go. [Laughter] Even the Germans follow the Orthodox custom. Lent in Germany and in Switzerland and Austria is called Fastenzeit: fasting-time.

Since Fr. Andrew has been preparing us for this season for the past several weeks, there’s not much left for me to say. Thank you, Father. [You’re welcome.] I’ll limit our reflections this morning to just three points. (Let me check these glasses; no, I guess it’s my eyes.) First, let’s consider man’s fallen state. This is a very unpopular doctrine since the time of Rousseau; since his time the world has been gripped by the heresy of optimism, one of the worst heresies ever to appear on the face of the earth. This heresy is very widespread.

A recent example is the book by Ritchie Robertson, entitled, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790. Now, this book of 1,008 pages: I suggest you all get copies and read it as a form of lenten penance. [Laughter] The pain will be excruciating. I did something like that during Lent one year. I set myself, as a penance, to read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. It was 881 pages of sheer torture! But I do believe a priest should read at least one work of heresy every year just to see who the enemy is.

Anyway, Ritchie’s new book is not just historical; it starts on the premise and finishes on the conclusion that the Enlightenment was a good thing. Now, the basic thesis of the Enlightenment contended that man and his rationality are naturally endowed with an intrinsic hope, encouraging him to govern himself without any outside help, especially from God. For the Enlightenment, man is not naturally fallen. Adam’s original sin is just a myth. And that is certainly true across the board today! I mean, try any single news outlet, and we’re told over and over again that man, especially Americans, are intrinsically good. The only thing worse, they’re saying, is that some people are saying that Americans are intrinsically bad.

But according to the Enlightenment, man is a naturally good being who has everything he needs to pursue and attain happiness. It will be done if we just get the government right. [Laughter] If you take care of that, it will all be happy, because the government will do what God has never done: save man. The Enlightenment contends that the human mind starts as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, on which his empirical experience writes all he needs to know for that pursuit of happiness. Now this is an idea we associate with thinkers as disparate as Rousseau, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson.

Now, there is zero evidence, of course, to support this optimism, and anyone who has attempted to raise children can think of a thousand arguments against it. Among the earliest proponents of unfounded optimism, we should count the citizens of ancient Nineveh. They firmly held to that heresy, till the Prophet Jonah showed up one day and instructed them otherwise. You all know the story. If you don’t know the story, then show up Holy Saturday morning when somebody’s going to read it for us, all four chapters. We’ve been doing that at least since Ruth Keller was eight. You know the story.

Jonah was easily the most effective of prophets. With only a half a verse of prophecy, he turned the whole place around. The Ninevites, for their part, heard the warning, and responded by establishing a big event called Ash Wednesday. It’s in the Bible. You can’t really say it’s Wednesday, but you know it is. [Laughter] The Bible tells that the Ninevites put ashes on their heads and began a 40-day fasting season. It was the first recorded observance of Lent among the Gentiles. So how far back does Lent go? At least the eighth century before Christ—seventh century before Christ.

Now, this week, we go into our souls, starting with the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete for four evenings, and purge out of ourselves the terrible heresy of optimism. If you have even the slightest trait of optimism in your hearts, the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete and the Life of St. Mary of Egypt will take care of it for you. For those of you who’ve never been through that, show up tomorrow night.

We human beings are a fallen race. The fall especially infected the structure of history. St. Augustine of Hippo, for all his greatness, believed that the fall of Adam is transmitted biologically. This is an opinion with which the Church disagrees. By the way, Church East and West both disagree on that point. It didn’t become popular again until, well, the last 700 years. The transmission of the fall is not handed down through biology but through social history. And God saved us by entering that history. The Bible records the details of his entrance.

With a deep, radical, and ongoing repentance, the human situation is literally helpless and hopeless. Historical progress is a Marxist illusion. We are not moving toward Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point; we are heading toward hell with gathering speed. The Church wants to make sure we begin Lent with that conviction.

Point two, let’s talk about prayer, calling on God. Beloved, this is the season to rededicate ourselves to a serious life of prayer. I particularly recommend the psalms. Let me illustrate this recommendation through a story. May I have a show of hands: how many of you here have ever heard the name Natan Sharansky? Just one hand?

Woman: From you! [Laughter]

Fr. Pat: Am I that old? [Laughter]

Woman: Am I that old, then?

Fr. Pat: Nobody here has heard of Natan Sharansky? Good Lord. Joseph?

Joseph: The name rings a bell, but… [Laughter] The details are few.

Fr. Pat: It does ring a bell! I’m glad to hear that! [Laughter] Many decades ago, Natan Sharansky was very much in the news, and he became a hero to some of us. I followed his career closely. Ten years younger than myself, Sharansky was a political dissident and activist in the Soviet Union. On March 15, 1977, 44 years ago tomorrow, Sharansky was convicted of espionage and treason. He spent the next nine years in a serious of Soviet prisons, much of the time in solitary confinement, deteriorating health. But because of his high reputation throughout the West, millions of people signing petitions—I do believe I was one of them—the Soviet government reluctantly released him on February 11, [1986], and they gave him the visa—at least he got a visa—to journey to Israel, where he’s been making trouble for the Israeli government. [Laughter]

As Sharansky was about to board the plane to leave Moscow for Tel Aviv, he suddenly asked for a little book he had kept during those years in prison. His handlers refused to give him the book. “In that case,” said Sharansky, “I’m not leaving.” [Laughter] Then in the presence of TV camera crews from around the world, he flung himself into the snow and refused to budge. Anxious by this time to get rid of him, the Soviet government relented and returned the little book to him. It was a tiny thing with very small print, designed to fit into a breast pocket. It was the book of psalms, given him on the eve of his arrest by his wife, Avital. The book was written entirely in Hebrew, of course. In order to keep it in prison, Sharansky told his Communist captors it was an anthology of fairy tales, to make sure he did not confiscate it, he tore out the one page that contained three words in English: “Printed in Israel.”

I’ve seen pictures of this book, both before and after it was rebound, for eventually it was falling apart. I’m not sure exactly who bound the book for him. I think it was Scott Keller, but I don’t know for sure. [Laughter] You see, Sharansky was no optimist. Indeed, it was the optimists who threw him in prison, the people who thought we were progressing and moving toward something messianic. Those are the people you’ve got to worry about, the optimists, because they will really ruin it.

In his memoir, Fear No Evil, Sharansky describes what the book of Psalms meant to him during those dark, hopeless years in prison. He wrote:

The psalm book was the sole material evidence of my mystical tie with Avital. (That’s his wife.) What impelled her to send it to me on the eve of my arrest? The reading of the psalms not only reinforced our bond but also demystified their author. King David now appeared before me, not as a fabled hero or as a mystical superman, but as a live, indomitable soul—tormented by doubts, writing against evil, and suffering from the thought of his own sins.

It was the perfect book to have during all those years of imprisonment and solitary confinement. The psalms became Sharansky’s bread in the wilderness. Gradually, through assiduous prayer, giving shape to his mind and heart. Day by day, he found in the psalms the explanation and the exegesis of his own soul, during his many hours of trials and temptations to despair.

The book of psalms is not for those who have an easy life. If you have an easy life, you’re not going to like the psalms, I’ll tell you that. If you’re spiritually content, you’re not going to like the psalms. If, however, you’re struggling, you’re suffering, you’re tempted to despair, you’re discouraged—that’s the book for you. If you want to learn how to pray, start with the psalms. A monastic novice traditionally does not make tonsure until he has all the psalms down by heart—traditionally. Psalmody is the method of prayer we receive from the apostles and the Fathers of the Church. We use all sort of forms of prayer right now in the Orthodox Church for which there is no testimony in the apostles at all; psalms, yes.

The psalms should be prayed slowly, meditatively, reflectively. In the Orthodox Church in my experience, the recitation of the psalms in public amounts to a disgrace. There are churches in this—and if I weren’t being recorded, I’d name the churches—in this city are listening to the psalms being recited; it sounds like a tobacco auction in Kentucky. It’s a disgrace. If you want to get some idea how… what’s the pace for the psalms, listen to Eva read them in public, or Pat Kushner, or Sophie Killer. When you pray them alone, you want to pray them more slowly than that, of course.

If you feel you have to quantify psalmody, don’t quantify it by the number of psalms you’ve prayed. Quantify it by how much time you spend in such prayer. If you have to quantify it, don’t see how many psalms you’ve prayed; see how long you pray in the psalms, because they have to be prayer. Take your time with the psalms. This is poetry. It should be read as poetry. Let the psalms shape your heart. That is to say, know the psalms by heart—be lev, by heart.

Third point, you are engaged in a fight to the very end. This may be your last Lent. There’s a very good change that it’ll be my last Lent, but it may be yours. You want to get to the point, beloved, where you do almost anything, reflect that this may be the last time that you do it. For 22 years, I stood at this altar and presided over the worship in this parish. Every single time, I stopped and considered this may be the last time I do this. Let’s get it right. This may be your last Lent: let’s get it right.

You are engaged in a fight to the very end. In football, hockey, soccer, and basketball, it is possible to get so far ahead that you cannot possibly lose. That’s when you put in your bench. This is not true of golf or baseball. The man who leaves a baseball game before the last out of the ninth inning is a fool. There’ve been plenty of basketball, football games I’ve been to: you could leave before the end of the last quarter, long before.

This is not true of golf and baseball; it is emphatically not true of boxing. In these sports, it is possible to lose at the last minute. Repentance, beloved, is a boxing match. Don’t blame me about this metaphor; I didn’t make up the metaphor. It was St. Paul who first compared the Christian life to a boxing match. It’s in the Bible. In boxing, no matter how far you may be ahead on points, you can still be knocked out. Ask Billy Conn. Ask Joe Frazier. Billy Conn and Joe Frazier let their guard down too early. Both of these men were way ahead on points. They went into the 15th round, invincible. All they had to do was stay on their feet for three more minutes. They were both way ahead on points when Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali knocked them out in the 15th round. The first 14 rounds did not count.

And what happened to Judas Iscariot? He let down his guard during the 15th round. Beloved, during this time let’s concentrate and get very serious. We are not fighting against flesh and blood. The enemy is vastly smarter than we are, and he has defeated much stronger and smarter than we are. It is possible to lose this fight by a knockout, but we will certainly never win it by a knockout. At no point will we win it by a knockout. If we win, it will be by a decision at the end of the fight, and the enemy will still be standing. We will win on points. That’s why we never let our guard down and we are prepared to go the distance, because we are not going to knock out the devil.

Therefore, do not look for progress. The observation of spiritual progress is the greatest of illusions. It is so discouraging to see new people join the Orthodox Church and the first thing we give them is The Ladder of St. John of the Ladder, and then they go through and try to find out where they are. They’re not on step one yet, and they won’t be for about 30 years! The search for signs of spiritual progress is an illusion; it is a distraction. Any time you imagine you are making progress in the spiritual life, regard that thought as a demonic attack and put it out of your mind. Don’t worry what the scorecard says. If your opponent lands a heavy one upside your head, it won’t make any difference what the scorecard says.

Let us give our attention to the fight. Concentrate. Think. Think. Think. Your enemy has been fighting a lot longer than you. He’s been around for the whole history of the human race. You’re fighting the force that brought down King Saul. Your combat is against the intellect that deceived Judas Iscariot. Not one of us is as sharp or as strong as this opponent who is determined to bring us down. You are never safe in this world. Don’t imagine ever you are. The battlefields of this world, beloved, are filled with the bones of indestructible armies. Those who fight best are invariably aware that they can lose.

“Once saved, always saved” is the most terrible expression of optimism. It is important to fight hard and above all to fight smart. Let’s not adopt any wrong or misguided theory about the nature of the fight. The blessed assurance spoken of in the epistle to the Romans is no substitute for humility and vigilance. At no point in our Christian lives can we afford to forget that we must work out our salvation, as Philippians says, with fear and trembling. That was St. Paul. We must use discipline lest we fall away. As Paul told the Corinthians, “Therefore, let him who stands take heed lest he fall.”

These are the words of St. Paul, who asked, “What can separate us from the love of Christ?” During this season, sweet people, let us place our lives, our destiny, in the hands of the immortal Christ, and pass this Lent as though it were our last. Amen.