Our journey through Great Lent toward Pascha is one that will involve fasting and prayer—not as a way to punish ourselves, but as a way to heighten our prayer life and draw our entire being into a prayerful communion with our Creator.

Our Orthodox Christian faith teaches us to think of God in "negative" terms—God is unknowable; God is indescribable; God is uncontainable. How, then, is it possible for us to know a God who is by nature unknowable? St. Basil the Great tells us that “We know God from His energies, but we do not claim that we can draw near to His essence.” It was upon this basic teaching that St. Gregory Palamas helped build our most fundamental understanding of Orthodox Spirituality.

What, then, constitutes God’s essence and what are His energies? Saints Basil and Gregory teach us that understanding the difference between them is very important to how we offer prayer to our Creator.

God’s essence (ousia) is the very nature of God and what constitutes Him—we can never partake of God’s essence for to do so would make us gods. God’s energies, however, are generated by His essence and take the form of grace and spiritual gifts that He bestows on humankind. It is God’s energies that the spiritual masters partake of. The greater their spiritual discipline or askesis, the greater is their basking in God’s energies. Think of the sun giving off illumination. If we are far away, we can still feel and see the sun. The closer we approach it, the more intense the light of the sun becomes, and as we enter its corona we are totally consumed by it. The closer we are, the more we partake of its energies. It is this trip into the light—this uncreated light—that St. Gregory Palamas teaches us about. When we partake of this uncreated, divine light we achieve what the Orthodox Church calls theosis.

Put simply, theosis is the end goal of Orthodox spirituality and that goal is a mystical union with God. St. Paul speaks of this “mystical union” in Scripture when he writes, “He has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of His will, according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9-10). This gathering together is what we call "union with God"—and was asked for by Christ to the Father when he prayed “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).

Practically, St. Gregory Palamas and the spiritual masters of our faith have offered a way for each of us to come closer to God. It is a closeness that allows us to bask in the light the pours forth from the very essence of the One who created each of us. Such closeness is not achieved by the mind alone but by the mind and body together focusing in such a way that our entire being is directed in prayer to God. Is such prayer only the domain of a few monks? Hardly. Very soon, we begin a period of fasting and prayer that will ultimately bring us to the Cross and Empty Tomb of Christ. In this most holy period of the year, we are engaged in the same type of spiritual exercise that this great saint taught us about.

Our journey through Great Lent toward Pascha is one that involves fasting and prayer—not as a way to punish ourselves, but as a way to heighten our prayer life and draw our entire being into a prayerful communion with our Creator. The purpose of the fast is to lighten the body so it can more properly focus itself in prayer. Indeed, this is why we fast before every Liturgy.

So we see that St. Gregory Palamas calls us all to a type of prayer that uses the two most basic weapons to combat evil—weapons that Christ gives us in Scripture—prayer and fasting. We see this when Christ tells His Apostles, “... this kind [of demon] does not go out except by prayer and fasting” (Matthew 17:21).

A common mistake that is made is to divorce one from the other (that is, prayer without fasting or vice versa). St. Gregory Palamas, however, teaches that true spiritual prayer can only be achieved by combining prayer and fasting in a set regimen designed for spiritual growth. We also tend to think of fasting in terms of avoidance of food, but true fasting is much deeper. It involves the fasting from the passions and desires in an effort to allow us to focus on the spiritual much more closely. We do not seek to “kill the desires,” but rather to be a person “in harmony with ourselves, with others, and with the world in its cosmic dimensions.” The goal is not to “reject the body, pleasure, or matter” but rather to draw them into “communion with the Holy Spirit.”

St. Seraphim of Sarov remarked that all of the ascetic practices are tools for one purpose—the acquiring of the Holy Spirit of God. From the Orthodox Christian perspective, it is one thing to call upon the Holy Spirit, yet an entirely different one to be able to receive the Holy Spirit. There is a story told of a golden Buddha that was covered with clay to hide it from invading enemies. To the workers who found it many years later, it was only a lump of clay. However, when we chip away at the covering of hardened dirt a gold statue is revealed beneath. The clay can be thought of as our sins and passions which must be stripped away to reveal the “image of God in us.” Seeking out the Holy Spirit is only half of the equation. We must strip off our preconceptions and prejudices in order to gain access to and comprehend that which the Holy Spirit is communicating to us.

In today’s society, we are trained from a very early age to think in our own individualistic terms—so much so that we often claim to know how God works and what His desires are. When we pray and fast, however, we must do so in humility, so that we do not confuse our will with that of God.

When we pray and when we fast, we are drawn closer to the divine light which St. Gregory Palamas so eloquently spoke of. This is the light we are all drawn to like the moth to the flame. This is the light that ignites within us when we partake of Holy Communion. This is the light that shines forth from the sanctuary when the priest stands at the Beautiful Gates on Pascha and proclaims, “Come ye and receive the light from the unwaning Light”. This is the light that Christ Himself spoke of when He said, "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life" (John 8:12).

We are all children of God and as His children we are called to His uncreated light. St. Gregory Palamas knew this and offered us the way to do so. As we begin our journey this Great Lent, we should take heed of St. Gregory’s counsel so that when we finally reach that glorious Paschal Day, we will see The Light—the light that signaled the dawn of a new creation.

May God bless you and keep you—In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Fr. Demetrios E. Tonias is the pastor of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Concord, NH, one of many "Share the Light Parishes" around the country that partner with the Orthodox Christian Network in a cooperative effort to build an effective media outreach for Orthodoxy. Fr. Demetrios, whose articles and sermons regularly appear on MyOCN.net, holds an M.Div. and Th.M. from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in historical theology at Boston College. You can read more written by Fr. Demetrios and listen to his parish's OCN-produced Internet radio station, by visiting Holy Trinity's Web site.

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