Our Venerable Father Daniel the Stylite (493)
Titus 1:15-2:10; Luke 20:19-26
Nativity Fast. Abstinence from meat and foods that contain meat.
Read Titus 1:15-2:10
“To the pure, all things are pure.” There are a lot of ways this phrase can go wrong. We misjudge our own intentions all the time and partake of things we shouldn’t. We call gossip, “healthy processing of grief,” we call our youtube binging “field research to see what our young people are into.” We waste time on Facebook to “stay connected.” In all these instances, in our heart of hearts, we know that there is something askew in our attraction to waste our time, attention, and energy to these things.
How do we know when we have attained purity of heart? This maximalist vision is given to us by one of the desert fathers, Abba Poemen. He writes: “If a man has attained to that which the apostle speaks of ‘to the pure, everything is pure,’ he sees himself less than all creatures.” The brother said, “How can I deem myself less than a murderer?” The old man said, “When a man has really comprehended this saying, if he sees a man committing a murder he says, ‘He has only committed this one sin, but I commit sin every day.’”
The desert Fathers sayings are great measures of our own activities because they lay out for us in their laconic and visceral speech the degree of excellence required to attain full stature in Christ. Such sayings test the mettle of our Christianity and show us the work that needs to be done to incarnate the word of God in our lives.