Episode Details

Upon reading the beginning of this homily, one clearly gets the sense that Saint Isaac the Syrian wants our understanding of the spiritual life, who we are as human beings, and a relationship with God (who has created us in His image and likeness), to be set on a foundation that is unshakable. One must love Isaac for the effort! He is giving us eyes to see. 

He began by presenting us with an image of a soul who truly abides in her nature, and so comes to penetrate into and understand the wisdom of God. Knowing nothing of the impediment of the passions, the soul is lifted up toward God and is astonished and struck with wonder. This is Isaac’s starting point for a reason. He wants us to regain what over the course of time has been lost; that is, our perception the beauty and wonder of how God has created us and our natural capacity for love and virtue. Furthermore, it is not just about perception but the experience of being God bearers and temples of the Holy Spirit. It is about our deification. 

What has distorted or understanding is the emergence of the passions and how we have come to view them. Isaac tells us categorically that the soul by nature is passionless. We are created in God‘s image and likeness and it is only the emergence of sin that has darken that which was created to be filled with light. Thus, when a soul is moved in a passionate way, she is outside her nature. The passions have the ability to move the soul after the fall. There’s a radical communion between body and soul and with sin our experience of the world through the senses and in our desires and appetites become distorted. The break of communion with God leads to an internal break within us as human beings; a fragmentation on the deepest level of our existence. What is the nature of a soul created for communion when it pursues autonomy from the one who created her in love? Is it not only the loss of unity with God but within ourselves and our capacity to experience and reflect our true dignity? 

Saint Isaac makes us work in these paragraphs and grapple to understand what he’s saying. Yet, it is a labor of love; for it is upon the foundation of this understanding of our nature that we will once again be able to see the wonder and beauty of how God has created us and experience the healing necessary to reflect this wondrous reality to the world.

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Text of chat during the group:

00:17:20 Bob Čihák, AZ: P. 127, paragraph 1

00:31:07 Lindsey Funair: When I hear the memories of the soul grow old, it reminds me that the soul knows not ego or attachment, it remembers only what is worthy of taking to Paradise, only that that is in Love. That is all there is once the world and self-love and other things that are not Love, is filtered from our memory.

00:31:13 Anthony: It's important to say that Isaac was born into a time and geography of turmoil and he wasn't living in comfort locked away from the outside.

00:31:43 Maureen Cunningham: Washington Carfer

00:31:52 Maureen Cunningham: Carver

00:33:02 Troyce Garrett Quimpo: This sections reminds me of St John of the Cross's Purgative Way.

00:36:11 Anthony: George Washington Carver

00:36:20 Vanessa: famous Black inventer

00:40:08 Maureen Cunningham: Yes George Washington Carver thank you , a little book I read . A Man who talked to flowers.

00:40:34 Anthony: I think when Isaac refers to philosophers he might have in mind the humors that dominate a man or t