St. Gregory Palamas & the Power of Prayer | A Lenten Reflection

On this Second Sunday of Lent, Daniel McInnes reflects on the life and teachings of St. Gregory Palamas—a great theologian and defender of the Orthodox faith. In this sermon, we explore his role in the hesychast controversy, the importance of true participation in God, and how we can apply his wisdom in our own spiritual lives. As we journey through Great Lent, let us be mindful of the voices we listen to and embrace the transformative power of prayer.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. Today, the Second Sunday of Lent, we commemorate St. Gregory Palamas, and there's a lot that can be said about St. Gregory Palamas. I'm going to say some things, but I would encourage you to read the life. We saw one version of it in the Synaxarion, but if you go online, you can read the different lives of St. Gregory Palamas, and they all have slightly different things, but they will teach you something really great about this great saint of our church.

So, just very briefly going over the main features of his life, he was born at the end of the 13th century, 1296, and he lived up until around about, I think, 1460 or so. At that time, his father was a senator. This was not in the life that we heard. His father was a senator in the Imperial Court, and his father was actually a great man of prayer to the extent that sometimes when he was in the Senate, he would be in prayer, and he would be so caught up in prayer that when the emperor was talking to him, he wouldn't even realize that the emperor was talking to him. So, his father was that kind of person. He was a great man of prayer, but he died early, and so Gregory was left without his father, and the emperor took him on and basically gave him a great education.

Now, he was educated by the best instructors of the day to the point where one of his teachers, his teacher of philosophy, said that when Gregory was speaking, he wasn't quite sure if it was Gregory or Aristotle who was talking. So, he had a great mind; he was a great philosophical mind. He was extremely well-educated. He could have had an excellent career in the Imperial Court had he wanted it; he could have gone in that direction, but his heart was always to serve God. So, at the age of 20, against the emperor's wishes, he went to Mount Athos and became a monk, and he spent the rest of his life as a monk, doing the things that monks do.

We heard it in the Synaxarion; one of the main things of his life, one of the characteristics of his life, was this hesychastic life that he was living. We'll talk more about that as we go along. By the time we get to the controversy with Barlaam that we heard about, by the time we've gotten to that point, he is already a very, very experienced monk. He has had the experience of the vision of Divine Light; he's had that experience. He's been abbot of a number of different monasteries. He's a very experienced monk; he knows what he's talking about.

But what the Synaxarion didn't say was when he was asked by the other kind of people, the hierarchs, to defend hesychasm against Barlaam, he didn't really want to. He wasn't that keen on actually doing it. He was a very humble guy who liked living the monastic life. It wasn't his will to actually go out there and become the big name that we know now as St. Gregory Palamas. That wasn't what he wanted at all. He wanted the quiet life of the monastery, but the times called him out. He was so well-educated, and he was the right person to do that job, and so he did it. He did it even though it wasn't what he himself would have wanted to spend those years doing. He did it anyway. Sometimes that's a person's lot in life, to do what needs to be done at a particular point.

So, he is a great saint, a very well-educated saint in terms of secular education, but also in terms of his spiritual stature. He's an amazingly well, you know, very highly developed spiritual kind of stature. That's what you would say he was. He reached the heights of where you could go in the monastic life. So, that's the person that we're celebrating today, and his part in all of this and why we know about him is because of the controversy that Barlaam stirred up in Constantinople.

A couple of things that we can say about that: Barlaam was a monk from Calabria, and at this point in time, of course, we're after the Great Schism, and after the Great Schism, the differences that were already existing in sort of their nascent form prior to the Schism became bigger. One of the big differences was how the people, how the monks and the church in the West saw God, and they had gone with a much more philosophical view of God to the point where they said it was impossible for a human being to actually participate in God or kind of connect with God in any real way at all. They saw God as only essence, and in their Greek philosophical thinking, if that's God, he can't change, he can't be moved or anything like that. You can't sort of have that connection with him. So, that's how they saw God. So, there was only kind of one way that you could have this connection with God, is that if God created something and then you connected with that.

When Barlaam came to Constantinople in the 1430s, what he found was he found monks, very simple monks, who were saying that they'd had this experience of the Divine Light, that they had actually experienced God. This Divine Light, this Divine, this was actually like God's—God, I won't use the word yet—but this was actually God that they had experienced, right? That's what they were saying. And because of his philosophical background, he was saying, no, that's not possible. You can't experience God like that. Either you're deluded and this is all just in your imagination, or you are participating in a created light. So, that was his argument.

Here we have a connection with today's Gospel. In the Gospel today, Jesus is in Capernaum, and it's the story of when the paralytic is lowered down through the roof, right? And Jesus heals the paralytic but doesn't heal him straight away. He says, "Son, your sins are forgiven" first, and then the Pharisees say, "How can he say that? You can't say that. Only God can heal, only God can forgive sins." And he says, well, because he knows what they're thinking, he says, "Well, which is easier to say, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to 'Rise up and walk'?" He says, "But so that you know that I do have the power to forgive sins, rise up and walk." The paralytic rises up and walks, right?

We have here a similar situation. These Pharisees had a particular view of God. In their world, there was no way that God would ever become incarnate and be sitting in front of them in a house, healing a paralytic. That was not something that they were expecting. That was not something in their world. For them, that was not possible. And here we have Barlaam of Calabria—the more things change, the more they stay the same—saying that because of his prior thinking, it was impossible to actually participate in God. But what we see with Christ is saying, no, you just don't understand. You don't know what you're dealing with here or who you're dealing with. And Barlaam himself did not know what he was dealing with in this particular case.

That was one issue. Barlaam had these preconceived ideas about God, and that colored all his thinking. He could not accept the possibility of real participation in God. On the other side, we have the simple monks. The simple monks, because they were simple, when they heard this very educated guy from Calabria coming, telling them, "Well, what you're doing is just crazy. It's not right. Either you're deluded or you're just participating in something created," when he said that, they listened to him because he was an educated guy.

To go to the epistle reading today, St. Paul is talking to the Hebrews, and he says this. He's talking about the law was given to them and all that kind of thing. He says, "Therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it." It kind of stuck out at me. These monks were kind of drawn away. They were drawn away by the words of a philosopher. Had they paid more attention to what they knew, to what they had been told, what they'd been brought up in themselves, they might not have been led astray by this guy, and the problem may not have become as big as it did. But it did.

And so it is for us that we always need to be very careful about the voices that we listen to. What voices are we listening to right now? In Great Lent, it's a really good time to think about that. There are so many voices in this world. There are more voices probably—we can hear more voices now than at any other time in human history, right? Because we have, you know, we've got this thing or the iPad or the whatever, you know, we can hear voices of all descriptions, all kinds, and we need to be discerning about what voices we listen to. Particularly now, it's Great Lent. We should be making an effort to listen to voices which are actually good for our salvation, right? Voices of people that we know are going to—whether it's a book or whether it's a video or whatever it happens to be—voices of people that we know are actually going to help us on our journey of salvation and not hinder us.

That can be sometimes difficult, but we always need to be aware that whenever someone's speaking about Orthodox Christianity or whatever, especially if they're—right now, everyone who speaks with authority, everyone should be speaking with the authority of a bishop, right? So, we should be listening to people who have those sort of authorities or their authority has been established through our—through using the church. For example, when you're reading St. John Climacus' book, "The Ladder of Divine Ascent," that's been read in monasteries for a very, very, very long time. We know that what's in there, there's no problems with any of those things, right? So, we read the things that we know that there are no problems with.

So, just be careful about what we listen to. We have the responsibility to care for our own hearts as well by being careful about that kind of thing. And these monks were led astray, but St. Gregory Palamas came and debated Barlaam, and he was able to very effectively defeat him and his disciples in this contest. But there was a bit of controversy along the way, but he was very effectively able to do that.

So, what was this whole thing about? Well, hesychasm was the practice where you basically quieten your heart so that you can receive God's grace, so the Holy Spirit can begin to dwell more and more in your heart, purify your heart, and then you become closer and closer to God. It's part of the process of theosis. It's a very particular way of doing things. There are some practices involved in it. Part of what was the controversy was that the hesychasts used physical postures when they were praying. So, they would bow their heads, they would sit on a chair and bow their heads, and so on. They would have maybe certain breathing techniques. They did these kinds of things. He was against that. He was against the idea that the actual Divine Light itself was actually God, not a created thing.

So, these aspects of hesychasm, the actual process of hesychasm, is not really what I want to focus on today. St. Theophan the Recluse, which is a 19th-century saint, said that in his day, monks were banned from any breathing exercises regarding using the—during hesychasm or using the Jesus Prayer because too many monks were hurting their lungs. So, they weren't allowed to do it. Now, the point is that it's unnecessary. It's unnecessary to have any particular techniques for this. It's all about quieting yourself and just continuing to pray. The prayer is, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner," is the usual prayer. Sometimes it's shortened, but that prayer is said repeatedly and quietly, and over time, the idea is that you would become quieter, more open to receiving the Holy Spirit, and the Divine Life of God would grow in you.

That's all I'll say about hesychasm, but that idea that the Divine Life can grow in you presupposes that there is real participation there, and that was the key. That was the key thing. What Gregory was saying was that God is not just this orb that you can't participate in, but rather there is an—God has an essence, and he has energies. The essence of God we cannot participate in. We don't know the essence of God, just like I don't know the essence of anybody in this room, right? I don't know your essence. All I know about you is how you interact in the world and how I experience that. That's how I know you. Those are your energies. Those are our human energies. So, you know me by the way that I act, by the way that I speak, all those kinds of things. You know me that way. Those are the energies that I have as a human being. God's energies, of course, are far, far bigger, far greater than my energies, but God's energies are his love, his mercy, all of those different things that are attributes we think of as God. Those are his energies in the world, the way that he acts to the world and to us. And what Gregory was saying is those ways in which God acts to the world, that's God as well. It's not material, not created. That's God as well. But we're not participating in his essence; we're participating in his energies and his actions in the world. Is that kind of clear? I don't want to get too deep in it because it's complicated, right? But that's where he was coming from. That real participation is the crux. If we don't have real participation, how can we be transformed by God, really?

So, that was the issue. That was what he was fighting against, and that's what he actually defeated in the end. So, St. Gregory Palamas is really one of the great heroes of our faith, which is why we're celebrating him today. He is probably—if you think about the great ecumenical councils, we have seven ecumenical councils. There was not an eighth one, but that was because the one that decided that St. Gregory was right wasn't actually confirmed by a ninth one. So, the actual things that he said were confirmed as being true by the church, but there's never been said that there's an eighth ecumenical council because of that. But it's treated—he's basically—his works and his teachings are treated in exactly the same way as if it had been the decision of an ecumenical council.

So, he's a great saint. Through his teachings, hesychasm has continued to have its part in the church right up until this day. All of us can participate in that life to some extent. We don't sit in—we don't go to monasteries, we don't go to our home and lock ourselves in our room and just pray all the time, but we can all say the Jesus Prayer while we're driving the car. We can all, in moments of frustration or anger or depression or whatever, we can always say the Jesus Prayer. We can always turn to God. God is everywhere present, filling all things. So, when we turn to him, he's there. When we pray and we ask him, "Help, have mercy on me," we're beginning to participate in his life by doing that. Every action that we do in those senses of things is our participation in the life of God. So, we can do that, and now that it's Great Lent, it's a great time to put it into action more. You know, whenever we—in our everyday life, we're extremely busy. Lent is a good time to try and slow down a bit, try and think about what voices we're listening to, try and think about, okay, now that I've got this situation, how am I going to react? Am I going to be angry, or am I going to just quieten myself, say the Jesus Prayer, and then, you know, actually try and live the life of Christ rather than just think about it?

May the Lord help us to continue to do that through the rest of Great Lent. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

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