“Nothing is more stable than instability”

“Nothing is more stable than instability”

Saint Makarios the Egyptian says that there is no stability in this life;' we should not even expect it. We rise and fall, we go up and down until we learn a great lesson: that salvation is not our achievement but the gift of God. ' Never-theless, we can acquire a relative stability in our instability on earth if we ask God every day to help us make a new beginning. He will unfailingly hearken to such a prayer, for it is God's nature to be ever new. Although He is called ‘the Ancient of days' and remains the same from the beginning to the end of time, He is always new and makes all things new: Thy mercies and Thy compassions are new every morning, says the prophet.

We are not meant to be always in an unchangeable state, whether good or bad; we need instability in order to understand the truth of God, His goodness and mercy, and the truth or rather untruth of man. The lessons we learn from these 'fluctuating experiences' fortify our nature so that it can preserve the grace of God for ever. Therefore, we need to make a new beginning so that we may acquire knowledge of the ever-new mercies of God and sing unto Him a new song every day.

When we rise, we learn God's nature in its energetic form, His goodness. When we fall, we come to know our weakness and poverty. Therefore, these alternating states, the coming and going of grace, help us to acquire the twofold vision outlined by Saint Sophrony: when we are up, we receive knowledge of God, and when we are down, we receive knowledge of man; when we know our weakness, we become thirsty to be saved. Saint Sophrony assures us of the necessity of this instability:

When God forsakes us and we dwell in hell, this allows us to recognise more fully how weak we are, how desolate. Our loneliness in the face of the inevitable mystery of death is fearful... The pain is especially intense for those who have known in some measure the majesty of contact with the love of God in the heart and in the mind. But nonetheless, only with the alternation between being visited and being abandoned can we achieve the 'twofold movement': downwards, to the dark chasms of Godlessness and then upwards, to the luminous realms where God is 'all in all'. 

When grace is with us, we give thanks in the power of the Spirit that possesses us; when we are bereft of grace, we give thanks in the power of living faith that God's goodness will save us.

Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou 

“Wavering in Quest of the Kingdom Which Cannot Be Moved”