To everything there is a Season, a time to weep a time to refrain from weeping.
I
once quoted a line of a "mystic" to one of my Christian fundamentalist
friends, trying to shake him from his "me and Jesus" victory parade,
realizing that his faith was not shallow, but ego driven. The line was: "Unless your feet have been baptized (immersed) in the blood of your broken heart, you have not entered upon The Way."
In his victory parade, and what the Father's have called "the Happiness
Seeking Delusion" he had no time for the profound implications of the
smallest and most complex verse in the Gospels that reads, "Jesus Wept."
How could the very Source of Life, the Creator of All Things,
standing in the full reality of the Eternal Godhead, at the same time
stand before the tomb of his dear friend, Lazarus, whose entire family
were his extended family, friends so close they were family, Lazarus'
mother, Lazarus' aunt. How could the Eternal God stand before a tomb
where Lazarus lay three-days dead, KNOWING that in mere moments he would
imbue that dead corpse with life and call Lazarus ALIVE from the tomb,
how could HE, with that knowledge, WEEP? I have heard fundamentalist,
you know the kind, the kind that say, "you should not weep, you should
CELEBRATE because they are in a better place." No one could
have had better and more complete knowledge of the fact that Lazarus
rested "in the Mercy of God" but even in that COMPLETE knowledge, as he
stood in Mortal Flesh, his heart beating, his blood flowing, his
emotions reeling, his eyes tearing, "JESUS WEPT" he did not CELEBRATE.
Some shallow Christian Fundamentalists say, "because Jesus Wept, we
don't have to, shouldn't need to, etc" thus separating their very
expression of and "reality of soul," (reality of their own psyche) from
their true humanity. In this place, on this earth, in this time we
battle "death in our members." WE ALL DO. We struggle as Saint Paul
stated, for our mortality to be swallowed up in immortality, our Death
conquered in LIFE. Those who celebrate pridefully and not in the sodden
sandals of Our Lord, risk trusting their pride and losing The Way.
So again I say, "Unless your feet have been washed in the blood of your
broken heart, you have not entered upon The Way." What is the purpose
of that broken heart? To give us the humility to put away every illusion
and lie, and grasp in our deepest self, ONLY what is REAL, RIGHT and
embued with Eternal Life. So as a sinner, whose feet are again being
baptized in the blood of my own heart, I say, "Lord Jesus Christ, who
wept at the death of Lazarus, have mercy on me also, and those we love
and walk us into the land of the living, where death holds no more
threat, where we can say with Saint Paul, " O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the
strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." This is a WAR folks, I
have stated that fact thousands of times in my writings and in my
videos, "THIS IS A WAR." It is a war against every LIE, every fantasy,
every illusion, and delusion that is death engendering; and contrary to
popular opinion, those who cling to LIFE, lose it. "For whosoever will
save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my
sake shall find it," so Jesus said. What does losing one's life for
Jesus' sake mean? It means stomping on the selfishness of our own
hearts and at each moment consciously choosing to do what LOVE demands.
"God is Love" and to be bound to him, is to be bound in love. "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."
The orchestrated warmongering of the Western Powers The 1917 Russian Revolution was orchestrated, beginning in 1914, from the British Embassy in Saint
Petersburg, and the American Embassy in Kiev, and stoked by the
anti-monarchial , warmongering tabloid western media. Following the
overthrow of the Czarist government, the revolutionary government itself
was taken over by extremists, and the world was to face seventy years
of communist genocide against Orthodox Christians. The anti-Orthodox
views of these Western powers is well documented, and continues to this
very day as witnessed by the betrayal of Orthodox Christians in Kosovo,
Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, the Gaza strip, and now the
Ukraine. And now, the Untied States backed terrorism against the
canonical Orthodox in the Ukraine only continues what has become a long
standing hatred by the Western powers, of Orthodoxy.
Under President Obama, Washington’s propaganda machine set about to
convince the world that the Ukrainian separatists used an expensive
anti-aircraft missile system, together with Russian help, to down a
civilian aircraft with almost three hundred innocent people on board,
this in spite of the fact that the separatists had no incentive to shoot
down an airliner flying at 33,000 feet. The fact that the Ukrainian
junta does have Buk anti-aircraft missile systems and a Buk battery was
operational in the region and deployed at a site from which it could
have fired a missile at the airliner, is being completely ignored. One
Russian general familiar with the weapon system offered his opinion that
it was a mistake made by the Ukrainian military untrained in the
weapon’s use. The general said that although Ukraine has a few of the
weapons, Ukrainians have had no training in their use in the
twenty-three years since the Ukraine separated from Russia. The general
thought it was an accident due to incompetence. It is also to be
noted that the Malaysian airliner and President Putin’s airliner were
traveling on almost the identical route within minutes of one another.
Interfax quotes its source: “I can say that President Putin’s plane and
the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon.
That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at a height of 10,100 meters.
The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian
aircraft at 15:44 Moscow time. The contours of the aircrafts are
similar, linear dimensions are also very similar, as for the colouring,
at a quite remote distance they are almost identical.” There was
some speculation that Washington decided to rid itself of President
Putin and mistook the Malaysian airliner for Putin’s jet, and before we
say the American military is too sophisticated to mistake one airliner
for another, let us remember that the U.S. Military shot down an Iranian
airliner over Iranian air space, killing 290 civilians, while thinking
we were downing a fighter aircraft of the Iranian Air Force. Is
the United States government and her Western allies, so dominated by
hate-filled hawks, that we are willing to set the stage for World War
III, or will we finally put aside our insatiable desire to control the
whole world, together with our colonialist European Union allies? Is it
really beyond comprehension that our American administration, backed by
CNN, Fox News, and an array of compromised Western Media types, is
hell-bent on continuing the long standing position that Russia is our
enemy? Do we not see that the sanctions against Russia are, in fact, an
act of war? And why are we American Christians not concerned that our
government, as it did in 1914, is saber rattling against the one
Christian nation that is attempting to withstand creeping secularism,
atheism, and militant Islam, while holding to the standards of biblical
Christianity? Let us be vigilant in our thinking, keeping
ourselves open to the truth. Blindly viewing everything our American
government says leaves us wide open to the same dangers that caused the
German people to fall prey to the Nazi propaganda machine, and we know
where that led. Perhaps a diplomatic solution called for by President
Donald Trump, could begin with the United States and her European Union
allies, stepping out of the affairs of the Ukrainian people. Perhaps we
could start looking at Russia as the potential ally she is, and not
seeing her as the enemy she is not. And, perhaps we could consider that
the Ukrainian government, facing the possible partitioning of their
country, could very well believe that bringing on World War III could be
the only way they can bring Western countries into their war with
Russia. I have been in pain of heart over this issue for a very
long time. I've made it a point of staying away from politics, but, like
the Lutheran pastors who spoke out against the Nazis, and paid the
price, I must speak out, if for no other reason than to serve in the
traditional role of the monk as prophet. We are dangerously close to war
with Russia, and as a monk I am driven to speak the truth as I see it,
unpopular as it may be. I am not being political, nor am I being
unpatriotic or un-American. I am simply a priestmonk calling upon his
nation to repent, return to our Christian roots, and basic Christian
values we've held to as a nation, since the foundation of this great
nation. With love in Christ, Abbot Tryphon
