The Jesus Prayer →

Over the last few weeks, I have mentioned on more than one occasion “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” by St. John Climacus. It’s a work of great spiritual insight, originally written for monks, but read every Lent by many Eastern Catholics and Orthodox. I’ve read it a few times myself and have returned to it this year after several years away.

I read Step 28 today. It’s a chapter on prayer, and I was struck, as I have been in previous readings, by how simple and straightforward St. John’s advice is. 

The noonday devil →

Psalm 91 is probably best known to most Catholics as the text of a hymn that everyone either loves or hates: “On Eagle’s Wings.” (Count me in the less than enthusiastic crowd. But then, my taste in Church music runs to Byzantine chant.)

That same psalm, in the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate (the canonical Latin version of the Bible), is the source of a phrase that was once common in prayers and in discussions of the seven deadly sins: “the noonday devil.”

Hitting the wall →

Marathon runners talk about “hitting the wall.” It’s that point in the race — often around the 18-mile mark, but sometimes later — when the energy reserves in your body have been depleted, and you’re relying on the calories that you’re taking in as you run to get you all the way to mile 26.2. Most marathon training programs include nutritional advice to help you maximize those energy stores, and the tradition of carb-loading with a pasta dinner the night before the big race is, at its root, an attempt to give you what you need to power through the wall.

Having run four marathons, I can testify that hitting the wall isn’t a lot of fun. But the worst part about it is not the physical effects but the mental and spiritual challenge that it poses. After months of training, you’ve come to rely on yourself — and suddenly you realize that your ability to make it to the end of the race is no longer something you can control on your own.

Signs, symbols and reality →

“As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When can I enter and see the face of God?” (Ps 42:2-3).

The deer, I learned from St. John Climacus in “The Ladder of Divine Ascent,” was seen by Christians up through his time (the seventh century) as a symbol of virtue, in part because people believed that a deer could suck a snake — a symbol of vice and of demons — up out of its den in the ground and swallow it whole.

That deer don’t actually do that is beside the point. In the modern age, men have come to view natural phenomena in the most materialistic of terms. Even if deer did suck snakes out of the ground and swallow them whole, we’d find video of the event on YouTube or the National Geographic channel to be fascinating, but our minds would never go where St. John’s, and the minds of hundreds of thousands of Christians before him, went.