“What can I offer the Lord for all He has done for me?” (Psalms‬ ‭116‬:‭12‬) LET US GIVE THANKS UNTO THE LORD.

“What can I offer the Lord for all He has done for me?”   (Psalms‬ ‭116‬:‭12‬)

LET US GIVE THANKS UNTO THE LORD

*How does modern culture come to grips with the sacrifices of the Great Martyrs whose legacy refuses to go away? Their names identify not only our humble selves, but the cities, schools and hospitals on our maps, while tours of the great European capitals find the secular-minded in more churches in a week than they imagined visiting in a lifetime … 

Saint Catherine and the other Martyrs whose young lives touch our own in so many ways – Marina was only fifteen – clearly understood what the age of technology struggles with: God is thanked not by grasping ever more of his gifts, but by sacrificing them to something so much higher than material pleasure that we have no name for it. What, then, is the experience that transcends the desires of the senses?

Without a doubt – the gift of God to the soul that single-heartedly seeks it.

The light on Mount Sinai shines with incredible clarity, and the path to the Holy Summit is clearly marked. It gets breezy toward the top, and brisk winds try to blow the slight of stature right off the rocky steps. But no ambiguity clouds the ascent, and the same is true of the spiritual message that God descended on its heights to bestow on humankind, and that Saint Catherine emblazoned on all posterity in denouncing idolatry to the Roman emperor Maximian: You shall have no other gods before Me.…

Putting the Savior first, not now and again, but on every occasion, infuses life with all the genuine happiness it lacks, keeping in mind an important point: It is not our successes that unite us to the love He wishes to shower on us. It is rather the gratitude to God couched in our efforts to succeed that matter most, as [the retired] Archbishop Damianos subtly pointed out when he said, “The person striving for sanctification participates in the divine attributes of God.” It is telling that he did not say “the sanctified person” participates in God … Greek is precise on such points, as was Saint Paul when he wrote that both the One sanctifying and those being sanctified are all of one.

How can sanctifier and the sanctified be one, asked Cyril of Alexandria – when God alone has the power to sanctify? Only in Christ is it possible, he answers, whose human nature, as the only perfect Man, is restored by His divine one from the effects of the fall.

Christ deifies His own human nature on behalf of all, so that humans can follow suit. But will mankind profit? Moved by a love for God too powerful to be muted by the passage of ages, Saint Catherine and the other Great Martyrs offer their lives – not only to God, but to us – as proof that simply putting love for God above the idols we make of food and drink, friendship and relatives, wealth and status and every other earthly pleasure, enables us to reach levels we never imagined – the ones for which we were created …

One need but start on his path, according to Saint John Klimakos, in order to find out where his efforts will take him. Something similar must have occurred when Saint Catherine, turning her intellectual powers inward to discern the truth of Christ, rose not only to the sacrifices of the Great Martyrs before her, but precipitated her own martyrdom, condemning idolatry not only with words, not only with sufferings, but above all, with her love for the truth. More than an act of bravery, the Saint imitates the Passion of Christ Himself in reversing the mistake of the first humans who chose material pleasures over delight in God.

For good reason we filled our cities and lives not only with the names of the Great Martyrs, but the message of their single-hearted devotion. For the light of no other answers our own deepest longings, couched in the commandment to prosper that thundered on humanity from the God-trodden Mountain of Sinai in the immortal words to love God, first….

For the complete Article "For the Feast Day of St. Catherine: The Inward Gaze of Sanctity" by Sr. Joanna, please go to: https://www.mountsinaimonastery.org/news-blog/2019/11/24/the-inward-gaze-of-sanctity