Friday, July 16, 2010

Perfection: The Divine LIght

The one who has purified himself of the passions and has reached a burning love for God on the steps of the virtues can attain the vision of the divine light...
The attainment fo the divine light indicates that one's nature has been spiritualized, perfected, so that it is a clear receptacle of the warmth and a light of the love of God. There are no traces of ego-centeredness left.  The Holy Spirit shines from within, enlightening one's presence.

Father Dimitru tells us that St. Simeon the New Theologian... and Gregory Palamas have described these three elements;
a) The light is a manifestation of love
b) This love is the work of the Holy Spirit
c) He that raises himself to this state of light or of culminating love forgets bodily sensation, produced by the world through the body, and even himself.
He says,
The intesity of this love, the blinding level of light with which it overflows, makes the body of the one who expereinces it totally transparent for others...
The bodily sense are overwhelmed.  Fr. Dimitru writes,
The body and the world are not done away with but they become the medium by which the interior light is made known.  A paradoxical thing happens.  First, the exterior things are overwhelmed; secondly, a great love is poured out through them, to everybody.  Light radiates from everything.
Saint Gregory Palamas says,
This is union: that all these things be one, that the person who sees no longer be able to distinguish between himself and that through which he is seeing, but he only knows this much: That it is light and he sees a light, distinct from all creatures.
Reference: Orthodox Spirituality, pp 358 - 361

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