Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost. Our Holy Father Gregory the Wonderworker, Bishop of Neocaesarea (270-75). Passing into Eternal Life (1947) of Blessed Josaphat Kotsylovsky, Bishop of Peremyshl and Martyr.
Nativity Fast.
Ephesians 5:9-19. Luke 12:16-21.
Read Ephesians 5:9-19
With feelings, the only way out of them is to go through them. Initially our nervous systems might submerge them within us. Eventually they begin to surface. Working them out can take time. If they are feelings we don’t want and the time and ability to deal with them is something we don’t think we have, they can lurk below the surface, revealing themselves in troublesome ways.
Music and its shared experience with others is one of the ways we discover, work through, and express how we feel. That’s why arguing about music doesn’t get anywhere. We can’t tell other people how to feel and music is about feeling.
When we find “evil days” pressing in, if we’re not careful, a God-given good to gladden our hearts can be taken to the point of numbing our pain to escape into the forgetfulness of “get(ting) drunk with wine, (leading to) debauchery”. Or we can take our feelings in another direction, “filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart”. The key to getting out of a debauched state and into a Spirit-filled state is given in today’s reading in one of the earliest records of a Christian song:
“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead,
and Christ shall give you light.”
It is hard to get out of the darkness all around us if we retreat into the darkness within us. Wakeup calls give us an opportunity to let the light of Christ into those places within us, to show them for what they really are. Then we can turn from them and see our way clear to “all that is good and right and true and…what is pleasing to the Lord”.