Admitting One's Weakness

[Rich]

Admitting One's Weakness

"Remember, you will be faulted not because you are ignorant
against your will but because you neglect to seek out what it is that
makes you ignorant.
No one has ever been deprived of the ability to know the
importance of finding out what it is damaging to be ignorant of.
Neither have any been deprived of the ability to know that they should
confess their weakness."
--St. Augustine--Free Will 3, 19

Prayer:
I have gone astray, and I have remembered you. I heard your voice
behind me calling me to return. And now I return with excitement and
desire to your fountain.
--St. Augustine--Confessions 12, 10

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• November 19th – St. Barlaam the Wilderness-Dweller, Monk,
And Joasaph the son of the Emperor of India, and his Father Abenner

The emperor Abenner ruled in India, which had once received the
Christian Faith through the evangelization of the holy Apostle Thomas.
He was an idol-worshipper and fierce persecutor of Christians. For a
long time he did not have any children. Finally, a son was born to the
emperor, and named Joasaph. At the birth of this son the wisest of the
emperor's astrologers predicted that the emperor's son would accept
the Christian Faith which was persecuted by his father. The emperor,
in an effort to prevent the prediction from being fulfilled, commanded
that a separate palace be built for his son. He also arranged matters
so that his son should never hear a single word about Christ and His
teachings.

When he was a young man, Joasaph asked his father's permission to go
out of the palace, and he saw such things as suffering, sickness, old
age and death. This led him to ponder the vanity and absurdity of
life, and to engage in some serious thinking.

At that time a wise hermit, St. Barlaam, lived in a remote wilderness.
Through divine revelation he learned about the youth agonizing in
search of truth. Forsaking his wilderness, St. Barlaam went to India
disguised as a merchant. After he arrived in the city where Joasaph's
palace was, he said that he had brought with him a precious stone,
endowed with wondrous powers to heal sickness. Brought before Joasaph,
he began to teach him the Christian Faith in the form of parables, and
then from the Holy Gospel and the Epistles. From the instructions of
St. Barlaam the youth reasoned that the precious stone is faith in the
Lord Jesus Christ, and he believed in Him and desired to accept holy
Baptism. Having made the Sign of the Cross over the youth, St. Barlaam
told him to fast and pray, and he went off into the wilderness.

The emperor, learning that his son had become a Christian, fell into
rage and grief. On the advice of one of his counsellors, the emperor
arranged for a religious debate between the Christians and the pagans,
at which the magician Nakhor appeared in the guise of Barlaam. In the
debate Nakhor was supposed to acknowledge himself beaten and thereby
turn the imperial youth away from Christianity.

St. Joasaph learned about the deception in a dream, and he threatened
Nakhor with a fearsome execution if he were beaten in the debate.
Nakhor not only defeated the pagans, but he himself came to believe in
Christ, and he repented and accepted holy Baptism and went off into
the wilderness.

The emperor also tried to turn his son away from Christianity by other
methods, but the youth conquered all the temptations. Then on the
advice of his counsellors, Abenner bestowed on his son half the realm.
When St. Joasaph became emperor, he restored Christianity in his
lands, rebuilt the churches, and finally, converted his own father
Abenner to Christianity.

The emperor Abenner died soon after Baptism, and St. Joasaph abdicated
his throne and went off into the wilderness in search of his teacher,
Elder Barlaam. For two years he wandered about through the wilderness,
suffering dangers and temptations, until he found the cave of St.
Barlaam, laboring in silence. The Elder and the youth began to
struggle together.

When St. Barlaam's death approached, he served the Divine Liturgy,
partook of the Holy Mysteries and communed St. Joasaph, then he
departed to the Lord. He lived in the wilderness for seventy of his
one hundred years. After he buried the Elder, St. Joasaph remained in
the cave and continued his ascetic efforts. He dwelt in the wilderness
for thirty-five years, and fell asleep in the Lord at the age of sixty.

Barachias, St. Joasaph's successor as emperor, with the help of a
certain hermit, found the incorrupt and fragrant relics of both
ascetics in the cave, and he brought them back to his fatherland and
buried them in a church built by the holy Emperor Joasaph.


Saint Quote:
"The sign of purity is to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with
those who weep; to be in pain with the sick and in anguish with the
sinners; to rejoice with the repentant and to participate in the agony
of those who suffer; to criticize no man and, in the purity of one's
own mind, to see all men as good an holy."
--St. Justin Popovich.

Bible Quote:
The single nation, mine, is Israel, those who cried out to God and
were saved. Yes, the Lord has saved his people, the Lord has delivered
us from all these evils, God has worked such signs and great wonders
as have never happened among the nations. (Esther 10:3 )


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On hearing of the word of God

Let us then also learn hence to consider all things secondary to the
hearing of the word of God, and to deem no season unseasonable, and,
though a man may even have to go into another person's house, and
being a person unknown to make himself known to great men, though it
be late in the day, or at any time whatever, never to neglect this
traffic. Let food and baths and dinners and other things of this life
have their appointed time; but let the teaching of heavenly philosophy
have no separate time, let every season belong to it. For Paul saith,
'In season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort (2 Tim. 4:2); and
the Prophet too saith, 'In His law will he meditate day and night'
(Ps. 1:3).
--St. John Chrysostom.