Our Venerable Father Martinian
Great Fast Day 2. Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Read
Genesis 1:14-23
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Well brothers and sisters, we survived the first day of our Fast, but we are reflecting on the fourth and fifth days of creation. We see the Lord’s continued pattern of making a space (the waters, the sky, the land etc.) and filling them with creatures proper to that order of creation. The stars and moon rule the night, the sun rules the day, fish are for the sea and birds are for the air. After each creation we hear the affirmation: “And God saw that it was good.” Material creation is not “secondary” or evil or less important than “spiritual” realities. God made a world and made it good. He made us in this material world as well, and comes to us in His Incarnation—in the material world. We might be tempted to seek God in a purely “spiritual” (immaterial) sense, but this has never been the reality of the way God made us, made the world, or how He continues to speak to us. Worshipping the Lord requires all of us, our whole being, body and soul.
CS Lewis puts this best when he writes: “It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution—a biological or superbiological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”
This world is good! Let us approach God in His good creation, with our whole being, body, spirit and soul!