Mark 9:17–31 | Fourth Sunday of Lent — St. John Climacus

 

Last Holy Lent, a certain newly Orthodox woman with access to a printer, a three-hole punch, and a dangerous amount of confidence decided she was ready for Sinai.

 

Not actual Sinai, of course. No camels were saddled. No desert provisions were packed. No one here was running a home-based stairway-to-sanctity enterprise out of the dining room.

 

Still, there it all was: The Ladder of Divine Ascent—that fierce seventh-century classic by St. John Climacus which Orthodox Christians return to every Lent—a printed reading guide, a backup guide in case the first guide proved insufficiently guiding, a stout overview besides, and—naturally—a binder.

 

A very good binder. Pages lined up just so. Holes punched with satisfying precision. Fresh paper. Holy ambition. It all bore the distinct fragrance of printer ink, good intentions, and a woman who had not yet grasped that Lent is not particularly impressed by office supplies or religious ambition.

 

The whole thing carried the unmistakable air of a woman preparing to storm heaven with tab dividers.

 

And for a while, the program held. Pages were read. Lines were underlined. Thoughts were thought. Great earnestness prevailed.

 

Then confession arrived one week before Pascha—Orthodox Easter—and with it that kind of grace which does not flatter, does not toy with us, but does strip illusion with frightening gentleness.

 

Step One.

 

That was the trouble.

 

Not Step Twenty-Two. Not some high and airy rung where only saints and very severe monks are expected to keep their footing.

 

Step One.

 

Renunciation of the world.

 

St. John Climacus begins there because he knows what most of us spend years trying not to know: the spiritual life does not begin with heights. It begins with severance. With exposure. With seeing clearly at last what still has us by the throat.

 

Repentance, he says, is “the daughter of hope.” Not the daughter of panic. Not the daughter of spiritual melodrama. Hope.

 

One eager foot may have been lifted toward the Ladder. The other was still planted firmly in the age.

 

Conformed to this world?

 

Oh, quite.

 

Not in any glamorous or cinematic way. Nothing fit for a scandalized parish whisper-chain. Something duller. More respectable. More fatal.

 

Hurry. Vanity. Irritation. Appetite. The small hot pulse of self-importance. The cheerful assumption that Christ could remain central while the self quietly remained in charge of the whole arrangement.

 

The body was reading The Ladder.
The mind was reading The Ladder.

The soul, meanwhile, still had a boarding pass to the far country tucked into its coat pocket.

 

And then came the humiliating detail, the one I would much rather have left out.

 

There I was one evening, having read solemnly about detachment, standing in the kitchen in my socks, peering into a pot of lentil soup, and at the exact same moment mentally composing a small imaginary conversation in which someone admired how serious and deep my Lent clearly was.

 

Soup on the stove.
Vanity in bloom.
St. John in the binder.
The passions fully moved in.

 

That is the sort of scene one would rather the angels pass over in merciful silence.

 

But there it was: not monstrous evil, not scandal, just the old dreary and deeply rooted need to be somebody while pretending to become nobody.

 

A soul can read about renouncing the world and still be quietly applying for tenure in the kingdom of self.

 

And that is exactly why the Church gives us St. John Climacus in the middle of Lent—not at the beginning, when zeal still smells like sharpened pencils and noble plans, and not at the end, when Pascha is already breathing at the edges.

 

Here. In the middle.

 

When the flesh has opinions. When the notion that one might become quietly radiant by Thursday begins to collapse under its own weight. When the soul is finally tired enough to tell the truth.

 

Glory to God.

 

The Church is not sentimental. She is medicinal. And she is far too wise to leave us alone with our binders.

 

Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote that repentance is “a deep desire to return.” Not a performance. Not religious gloom. Not tasteful remorse in good lighting. A deep desire to return.

 

Which means repentance is not merely saying, “I have done wrong.” It is the far more painful and far more beautiful recognition that one has wandered from home and is suddenly homesick for God.

 

That is the kind of gift that ruins one for pretending.

 

Because once homesickness begins, ordinary life can no longer hide us from ourselves.

 

The problem is not that life is lived in the world. The problem is how often the world lives in us—its speed, its vanity, its restlessness, its low-grade theater of self-importance.

 

That sounds almost elegant until Monday morning.

 

Then it looks like reaching for the phone before reaching for prayer. It looks like carrying anxiety around like a travel mug. It looks like wanting to be thought insightful more than wanting to become humble.

 

It looks like saying, “I trust God,” while quietly attempting to run quality control on the universe. 

 

It looks like one small interruption arriving as a personal affront to the kingdom of self, which had, naturally, a schedule and very little patience for reality.

 

We say we want God’s will, but often what we mean is this: may God please bless my preferred script and refrain from rewriting the scene.

 

This is why St. Dorotheos of Gaza remains such a useful nuisance. Disturbance reveals attachment. Agitation uncovers what the heart still calls mine: my time, my comfort, my plan, my image, my right to proceed unthwarted toward whatever shining thing I had in mind.

 

A house, a phone, a body, a fallen heart: that will do it.

 

It is also why I love Orthodoxy more every year: she refuses to let repentance remain vague. She gives it smell and shape. She puts it in the services, in prostrations, in the Prayer of St. Ephraim, in fasting that irritates the passions by denying them the microphone, in confession that names what I would much prefer to keep atmospheric.

 

She does not say, “Try to become a more spiritual person.”

 

She says, in effect, “Come into the light, dear heart. Bring your vanity. Bring your appetite. Bring your restlessness. Bring that respectable attachment to being admired. Bring that heaviness you have sometimes mistaken for depth. Bring the whole overdecorated self. Bring it here.”

 

No wonder binders are so appealing.

 

My binder told me I was earnest. Lent revealed how divided I still was.

 

And then the deeper work begins.

 

St. Isaac the Syrian prays for help with “my scattered impulses,” and there may not be a more accurate phrase for the ordinary modern soul. Not grand rebellion. Scattering. Fragmentation. A heart pulled thin by ten thousand little wants, irritations, daydreams, appetites, memories, grievances, and fears. A soul unable to stay in one place long enough to love God there.

 

Pride hates the first rung because it is small, hidden, and humiliating. Pride wants altitude. Pride wants progress impressive enough to mention over soup. Pride wants to skip to the advanced material and become, very quickly, the sort of person others describe as quietly radiant.

 

But the Christian life, most weeks, is not dramatic ascent.

 

It is patient return. It is being found out and not fleeing. It is learning that the soul is less advanced than it imagined and more loved than it dared hope. It is discovering that the Cross is not waiting politely at the top of the Ladder like a final exam.

 

It is already burning in the wood of the first honest step.

 

And this Sunday’s Gospel meets us there with a tenderness that nearly undoes a person.

 

Not with the voice of a spiritual athlete. Not with the testimony of someone who has conquered doubt forever. But with a father in tear-stained anguish, standing before Christ with a suffering child and a heart divided against itself.

 

“I believe; help my unbelief!”

 

There are few more honest sentences in all of Scripture.

 

Not polished belief.
Not unwavering interior brightness.
Not the sort of faith one might be tempted to admire in oneself afterward.

 

Just this:

 

I do believe.
And I do not believe enough.
I am coming toward You even as I feel my resistance.
I am asking for help with a heart that is not yet whole.

 

That is the kind of prayer pride hates.

Pride would rather offer Christ a cleaned-up soul, a stable witness, a properly arranged interior life with the theological furniture in order.

 

But this father offers what most of us actually have:

 

love,
fear,
hope,
desperation,
and faith shot through with tremor.

 

And Christ does not turn away from him.

 

He does not say, “Return when your belief is less embarrassing.” He does not demand a more impressive spiritual résumé. He meets the man there—in the broken middle, in the half-lit place, in the cry that is already faith because it is turned toward Him.

 

Which is to say: the first honest rung may sound less like triumph than like pleading.

 

“I believe; help my unbelief!”

 

That is not failure. That is the beginning of truth.

 

Because the Christian life is not built on pure motives, tidy certainty, or any of the other things we keep wishing we had before coming to Christ. It is built on bringing the real condition of the heart into the presence of Christ.

 

Not certainty without need.
But need brought honestly to Love.

 

And perhaps that is the deeper consolation of this Sunday joined to St. John Climacus.

 

The Ladder exposes us.
The Gospel consoles us.

 

The Ladder says: you are not nearly as free as you imagine.
The Gospel says: bring even that bondage here.

The Ladder says: take the first honest step.
The Gospel says: even a faltering cry toward Christ is already such a step.

 

So yes: there is still vanity in the soup pot, still worldliness in the heart, still a thousand scattered impulses, still that dreary wish to be admired while becoming holy.

 

And also this:

 

a small bruised faith that keeps turning toward Jesus and saying, sometimes through clenched teeth and wet eyes, “Help.”

 

That cry may be more precious to Him than all our binders.

 

Because Christ does not wait at the top of the Ladder with folded arms and a performance review.

 

He meets us at the first truthful step. At the place of mixed motives. At the place of real desire and real resistance. At the place where the heart is still half in love with the world and yet hungry for something truer.

 

This Lent, more than once, that has meant relinquishing the idea of being good at Lent and settling for something holier: honesty. One real prayer. One refusal of vanity. One remembered Psalm before the thoughts stampede. One moment of silence before reaction. One act of restraint. One confession not prettied up for public use.

 

Not glamorous.

 

Better than glamorous.

 

True.

 

And hidden beneath the clatter of schedules, dishes, notifications, opinions, appetites, and inward weather, there remains what the Fathers keep trying to tell us: a secret place where the soul can turn again toward God.

 

A little monastery in the heart.

 

A lamp kept before the icons. A small interior chapel where the noise does not get the last word.

 

There Christ is no longer a theory and repentance no longer a performance. There the soul, having come down at last from its ridiculous throne, can kneel in poverty and find that heaven has already bent low to meet it. There the first rung is no longer merely wood beneath the foot, but grace beneath the whole of one’s weight.

 

The deepest comfort of this Sunday is not that faith must already be whole before we come to Christ, but that even the cracked and trembling faith that cries out to Him is received with compassion.

 

Not that many of us are climbing brilliantly.

 

It is that many of us are finally low enough to begin.

 

And perhaps that is why the first rung is so hated by pride and so loved by Christ: because it is the place where pretense dies first and worship begins again.

 

May He grant us this week the grace to stop mistaking spiritual seriousness for surrender. May He give us courage for the first honest rung: a little less theater, a little more truth; a little less self-management, a little more repentance; a little less posing, a little more prayer.

May He make of our homes, our parish halls, our cars, our sink-full evenings, our interruptions, and our often-scattered hearts a small hidden monastery where He is loved above all things.

 

Glory to God!

 

Perpetua

“Do not be surprised that you fall every day and do not surrender. Stand your ground courageously. And assuredly, the angel who guards you will honor your patience. While a wound is still fresh and warm, it is easy to heal; but old, neglected, and festering wounds are hard to cure and require much treatment, cutting, and cauterization. Many become incurable through long neglect. But with God all things are possible.”
—St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent