Vigils Reading – 29th Sunday
THANKSGIVING AND PRAYER
From a commentary by St Gregory of Nyssa
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The divine Word teaches us how to pray, explaining to disciples worthy of
him, and eagerly longing for knowledge of prayer, what word to use to gain a
hearing from God.
Those who fail to unite themselves to God through prayer cut themselves
off from God, so the first thing we have to learn from the Word is that we need to
pray continually and not lose heart. Prayer brings us close to God, and when we
are close to God we are far from the Enemy. Prayer safeguards chastity, controls
anger, and restrains arrogance. It is the seal of virginity, the assurance of
marital fidelity, the shield of travelers, the protection of sleepers, the
encouragement of those who keep vigil, the cause of the farmer’s good harvest
and of the sailor’s safety. Therefore I think that even if we spent the whole of our
lives in communion with God through thanksgiving and prayer, we should still
be as far from adequately repaying our benefactor as we should have been had
we not even desired to repay him.
Time has three divisions, past, present and future. In all three we
experience the Lord’s kindly dealings with us. If you consider the present, you
live in him; if you consider the future, your hope of obtaining what you look
forward to is in him; if you consider the past, you would not have existed had
you not been created by him. Your birth is his kindly gift to you, and after birth
his kindness toward you continued, since as the apostle says, you live and move
in him. On this same kindness depend all your hopes for the future. Only over
the present have you any control. Therefore, even if you give thanks to God
unceasingly throughout your life, you will hardly meet the measure of your debt
for present blessings, and as for those of the past and future, you will never find
a way of repaying what you owe.
And yet we, who are so far from being capable of showing due gratitude,
do not even give thanks to the best of our ability. We fail to set aside, I do not say
the whole day, but even the smallest portion of the day, to be spent with God.
Who restored to its original beauty that divine image in me that was
blurred by sin? Who draws me back to the blessedness I knew before I was
driven out of paradise, deprived of the tree of life, and submerged in the abyss of
worldliness? As scripture says, There is no one who understands. If we realize
these things we would give thanks continually, endlessly, throughout the whole
of our lives.