Homily at St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, 7531 (2024 on the civil calendar).

Today we commemorate Saint John of the Ladder, John Klimakos or Climacus, for the Fourth Sunday in Lent.

Saint John was the seventh-century Abbot of the Monastery dedicated to the Most Holy Mother of God on Mount Sinai, now known as Saint Catherine’s Monastery, located where the Holy Prophet Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, and the name of God, “I Am the Existing One,” to be fulfilled by the Incarnate Jesus Christ in the days of the New Testament in which we now live. He wrote the timeless book The Ladder of Divine Ascent at the monastery, which had been built at that holy site by the Emperor-Saint Justinian. The accompanying Life of St John Climacus says of the book rightly that “this Orthodox Summa of the spiritual life… has remained for centuries the outstanding guide to evangelical living, both for monks and for lay people.” The back cover of a recent new English edition notes: “A timeless classic of Orthodox spirituality, it is read aloud each year during the Great Fast in the refectories of Orthodox monasteries around the world. It has inspired generations of monks and laity alike to climb the rungs of spiritual life with renewed zeal, ardently ascending the steps of the virtues toward the goal: eternal life in the Kingdom of God.” The wording is interesting, because as a guide to “evangelical living” the book intimately connects our work here at the mission as missionaries with our spiritual lives, as should always be the case in Orthodoxy.

The icon of the Ladder, on the cover of the new edition of the book and also found in many churches and homes, shows our Lord and God and Savior reaching out to help those climbing the ladder, and an angel encouraging them, while one would-be pilgrim falls off the ladder into Hades, into the mouth of the evil one. St. John’s book echoes in its name the biblical ladder revealed to Jacob, and known to Church Fathers as a symbol of the Virgin Mary as a bridge between earth and heaven, in her being the greatest of the saints and first fully to achieve theosis or oneness with God in Christian life. But its original name was The Tablets of the Spiritual Law, appropriate to Mount Sinai. St. Catherine’s Monastery, where St. John spent most of his life and wrote the book, is perhaps the oldest continuing operating Orthodox monastery, and maintains what is likely the oldest extant library in Orthodox lands. According to tradition, monks there still tend in its garden the offshoots of the original burning bush.

John’s book outlines 30 steps of the symbolic ladder for becoming free from wordliness– more than any secular 12-step program, and symbolically three times the 10 of the commandments, indicating the Trinitarianism of Orthodoxy. Although it is known for its expression of the ascetic Orthodox ethos, its writing also punctures false asceticism and piety, exposing their egotism and self-righteousness. The Life of St John notes that, what St. Gregory the Theologian’s writing did for Orthodoxy in the theological realm, this book does for the practice of Orthodoxy, the applied Gospel so to speak. It is not about legalism, but about ascetic struggle in grace. The top of the latter is grounded mystically in love. St John wrote near the end that “Love bestows prophecy: love yields miracles; love is an abyss of illuminations; love is a fountain of fire: in the measure that it wells up, it inflames the thirsty soul. Love is the state of angels. Love is the progress of eternity.”

The Church in her wisdom placed the Sunday of St. John of the Ladder right after the Sunday of the Holy Cross. She thus focuses on the ascetic practice of the Church, bookending the Cross with the earlier Second Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, the great champion of hesychasm or meditative prayer. All three Sundays in sequence remind us of the practice of the noetic or mystical life of the Church. This Sunday in Lent is not just for monastics, it is for all of us in the Church on the journey to Pascha.

But how many of us have read this book whose author is commemorated this Sunday? Now is a good time to do so if you have not, or to re-read it if you have. St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Arizona, the largest Orthodox monastery in North America, recently published an accessible and affordable copy of St John’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent in English. It is also available from our Holy Trinity Monastery Bookstore in Jordanville. Brothers and sisters, I urge you all to get a copy this Lent if you do not have one, as we are just after the midpoint and there is still time to read it before Pascha.

The terms explained in the St Anthony Press edition explain why this book is such a spiritual education, and why its author is honored by the Church through the centuries at one of the five Sundays of Lent. “The Holy Fathers of our Church,” the preface reminds us, “are empirical theologains; they acquired knowledge of God not by rational speculation but by direct experience.” They are practitioners of the highest science, that of Christian asceticism and worship leading to the very purpose of humanity’s realization in theosis. Theosis is defined as “receiving God within the heart in His indwelling union with a person, making him god by grace.” Its prerequisite is hesychia, the practice of internal noetic stillness through prayer in the heart. “Noetic” is a term derived from nous, , which is defined as “the spiritual mind of man as contrasted with the rational intellect that deliberates and logically conceptualizes… ‘the throne of the Godhead’… ‘the eye of the soul.’” “God can be experienced directly and empirically through His contact with the human nous.” The nous is described as the organ of theoria, which in St. John’s book is described as “the vision of the spirit,” “a non-material revelation of God” to the nous. (By contrast, the term devil it is noted comes form the Greek diablos, meaning slanderer or liar, shaping a delusion that which tears apart rather than unites– thus historians note the paradox that modern totalitarian systems that demonically seek to erase faith rest upon societies in which people are lonely and isolated.)

Two of the Steps: Exile and Obedience

Photo: Skellig Michel, an early Irish monastic island.

The Ladder presents step-by-step the experiences and the otherworldly virtues, gifts of grace, of the uncreated energy of God, that bring believers to theoria.  Two of the steps near the start are exile and obedience, and are worth considering. Exile can be for a monastic like the early Irish leaving home on a journey or pilgrimage and finding a place on a windswept island like Skellig Michel or Farne on which to pray and live asceticially. Or for those of us in the world, it can mean an exile from worldliness and our old way of life, in the cell of our home icon table and in the efforts at noetic prayer with God’s grace throughout the day at work and home. The Russian Orthodox philosopher S.L. Frank, himself an exile from Bolshevism and Nazism, wrote of such exile as “strange love.” He said this strange love of the Christian is exile from a home that is no longer there, but woven into the longing for Paradise. For many in our modern world that home that is no longer there is a practical as well as a spiritual reality.

We see this in our own household. For me it is to be separated from the life I knew in the American Middle West with deep roots going back to my grandfather’s farm in what is now Chicago, my great-great grandfather’s presence at the nomination of Abraham Lincoln for president in Chicago, and the Iowa farmhouse and stream named for our family 150 years ago. For Matushka Olga, it is the exile from a homeland across the ocean, from a country that has changed so much as to no longer exist in the form she knew it, in a town with two names due to sharp historical changes in recent memory (Kirov and Viatka). And that is the same for all of us in different ways in this modern world, where so much has changed, and always even moreso for us as Christians who leave the old life of the world behind. Indeed, our dear Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is a Church of modern exile.

Bishop Luke at our Diocesan Clergy conference this past week spoke of the importance of spiritual rootedness to our lives alongside the Lenten podvig or ascetic duty of exile. In the Church we find our anchor and our place is in the presence of the Holy Spirit, at Church and in our noetic lives. Native Americans of old, the Haudenosaunee who predominated in this region in historical times, often moved seasonally and across years from place to place following cycles of food and safety. We may do the same in our modern world. But spiritually we find our rootedness in Church and the Eucharist coming forth from the altar, and in our prayer lives from our home icon table, also coming forth from our belonging in the Church. Part of that rootedness, Bishop Luke noted, is the spiritual tradition of our Russian Church. It goes back more than a millennium, and has direct ties before that to Byzantium and then to the Holy Land of the Bible.  Here, we are a mission Church in exile in one sense, but a rooted Church in another sense, and our roots ground us and sustain us here and now. 

One of the other 30 steps besides exile in the Ladder book is obedience. We find obedience in Orthodox Tradition, to our hierarchy in the Church with her apostolic roots and genealogy, obedience in Scripture in the Church Tradition, and through all these in obedience to God. In this way we humble ourselves. And a part of that obedience is our obedience to one another in our parish community as the fractal of the one holy Apostolic and Catholic Church right here and now in this place in northern Appalachia. When Father Seraphim Rose of blessed memory with Orthodox friends and brothers started as a lay person a small bookstore and printing press to develop an English-language Orthodox literature in America in the 1960s, he placed the fellowship of St. Herman under obedience to their Bishop John, now Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, our mission’s patron. They also placed themselves in obedience to each other in the fellowship, to help overcome self-will, under the direction of their bishop and Church pastor, St. John, and with God’s grace.

The result of their obedience coupled with their exile from their past lives brought a great blessing to the Orthodox mission in North America. Many of us here came into Orthodoxy in part through the English translations of Orthodox writings they published. I know that I did, glory to God! We too in our mission parish are in a fellowship owing obedience to one another and to the Church together with our exile from the world.

So the steps of the divine Ladder reach into our lives and transform us and others

Let us today honor St John Climacus, and ask for his intercession for our work as missionaries of the Orthodox gospel to a country in great need. Yet let us also not neglect his book as a practical guide in our lives. It offers empirical evidence and guidance about the transforming power of God’s grace in the Orthodox Church today. May the Lord help us to climb these steps of Orthodox praxis by His grace, and not fall off the ladder into hell, God forbid.

Glory to God for all things!