How to Be God’s Good Servants
The spiritual life has humility for its point of departure. A spiritual man is a saint who confesses himself a sinner. Humility in the presence of God is not an act but more of a permanent attitudeof awareness of the love of God and of one’s own inadequacy in responding to such love. Humility is an openness to God’s love even in the face of our inadequacy to respond.
Byzantine prayers place a great stress on our basic sinfulness and our numerous failures in love. Every Office and Liturgy is replete with expressions such as “my sinfulness,” “my unworthiness,” “my guilt,” “my many sins, voluntary and involuntary.”… If Byzantine spirituality stresses so much the sinfulness of mankind it is only to stress in a much more glorious way the goodness of God and the universality of his forgiveness and salvation. Our repeated expressions of repentance, when practiced as a way of life, engender in the soul a deep, inner awareness of resistance to the love of the all-merciful God….
Where man recognizes his own unworthiness as a sinner and the goodness of God as a Father, there is praise, and he finds forgiveness of his sins…. This metanoia of the heart, this longing to praise God for his mercy to us, is the proper attitude for man as he approaches the liturgy and the sacrament to receive the life-giving Spirit.
Archbishop Joseph M. Raya
Archbishop Raya († 2005) was a Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop, theologian, and author. [From The Face of God: Essays in Byzantine Spirituality. © 1976, Joseph M. Raya, Dimension Books, Inc., Denville, NJ.]
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