Day 7 of the Ascension to Pentecost series is live.
Today we are sitting with Mary in the Upper Room. Acts 1:14 names her explicitly and separately, and Jacob of Serugh helps us understand why.
At the Annunciation, the Spirit came to her alone. In the Upper Room, she prays that He might come to all.
She is not a bystander at Pentecost. She is its intercessory heart.
Two days until Pentecost. The fire is very close now.
Dear brothers and sisters, peace be with you.
Day 6 of the series is now on the blog, and today we are sitting with the promise that Jesus made in John 14 before the Cross: I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you.
The disciples in the Upper Room were living inside this promise on Day 6 of their waiting. They had no timeline. They had no picture of what was coming. They had only the word.
One thing I have been sitting with today is the Syriac understanding of the Holy Spirit. In our liturgical language, the Spirit is Ruha d-Qudsha, and the feminine grammar of that word gave our Fathers a theology of the Spirit as brooding, maternal, generative. The same Spirit who hovered over the primordial deep at creation, who overshadowed Mary at the Annunciation, is the one the disciples were waiting for in the Upper Room.
And the reflection connects this directly to the Epiclesis of our Qurbana. Every time the priest implores the Spirit to descend upon the gifts, we are standing in the Upper Room, holding out the promise of John 14 and asking for its fulfilment. The tradition is clear: that prayer is always answered. The Spirit always comes.
We are three days from Pentecost in this series. The fire is closer than it was.
Dear brothers and sisters, Day 5 of the series is now on the blog.
Today’s reflection is on the election of Matthias, and one thought has stayed with me since writing it.
Matthias is chosen to complete the Twelve. And then he disappears from the New Testament entirely. No recorded sermon, no miracle, no letter. He took the place that was given to him, served faithfully, and left no historical trace that we can find.
The kingdom of God is not built only by the famous. It is built, day by day, by people whose names appear once and are not heard again, who showed up when they were needed and were content to be known only to God.
Most of us are Matthias. And that is not a small thing.
Days of Waiting – Day 4
Today’s reflection is on one word: homothumadon. One accord. The word Luke uses to describe the Upper Room community at prayer.
One accord does not mean everyone feeling the same thing. It means many wills aligned toward a single purpose. Many faces turned toward the same horizon. The will choosing, day after day, to show up and wait, whether or not the feelings follow.
Isaac the Syrian calls prayer the mother of all virtues. The Upper Room community was not generating the Spirit by their prayer. They were preparing the ground for Him to come.
That is what our gathered prayer is for. To prepare the ground.
Day 3: Ascension to Pentecost Reflections for the Days of Waiting
“The Church is not a society of the perfect. She is a community of those who wait together for the perfection that only the Spirit can bring.”
— Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios
A reflection on Acts 1:13-15, the Upper Room community of one hundred and twenty, and what the Indian Orthodox and Syriac patristic tradition teaches us about gathered, communal waiting as the context in which the Spirit chooses to work. From the Oriental Orthodox blog Seeking Theosis, rooted in the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church and the Syriac patristic tradition.
Day 2 of our Ascension to Pentecost series is now on the blog, and today I have been sitting with one of the strangest verses in Luke’s Gospel.
After the Ascension, the disciples walked back to Jerusalem with great joy. Not after receiving explanations. Not after things had settled into clarity. With great joy, in the middle of the unknown, carrying nothing but a promise and a direction.
Ephrem the Syrian teaches us that the hidden God humbles the one who tries to investigate, but magnifies the one who simply worships. The disciples had learned, through three years of following, to be the second kind of person. And that is what produced their joy.
Today’s reflection asks us: what would it look like to return to our own Upper Room with that same quality of trust? Not waiting for feelings of certainty to arrive before we pray, before we gather, before we show up?
The oil lamp does not wait until it feels ready. It simply burns.
Come, Holy Spirit! Come!
We begin today nine days of waiting, from the Ascension to Pentecost, and Seeking Theosis will be posting a short reflection for each of these days drawn from our Syriac Fathers and the liturgical tradition of our Church.
Today’s reflection centres on a beautiful image from Jacob of Serugh: that when Christ ascended, He did not leave our humanity behind. He carried it with Him, wounds and all, to the right hand of the Father. The glorified Body that sits at the throne of the Majesty on high is still marked with the nails and the spear. Not as blemishes, but as glory.
“He did not leave behind what He had taken from us.”
That is the ground of our hope as we wait for the fire of Pentecost.
You can read the full reflection here.
Let us keep these nine days in prayer together.
The Feast of the Ascension | Stop Gazing, Start Going – Acts 1:1-11
The disciples stared at the sky. Of course they did. Their Lord had just ascended. Their eyes followed Him. The sky was the last place they saw Him.
Two angels: “Why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus will come back the same way He went.”
The question is a redirection. The looking up must give way to the going out.
St. John Chrysostom: Mark 16:20 is the charter of the Church. “They went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the word through the accompanying signs.” Going. Preaching. Co-operation. Confirmation. The four elements of the Church’s existence.
The King is on the throne. Stop gazing. Start going.
Full reflection at Seeking Theosis
Fifth Sunday After the Resurrection – He Set His Face Toward Jerusalem | Luke 9:51-62
Three would-be followers. Three costs.
“I will follow You wherever.” Christ: foxes have holes; the Son of Man does not. The cost: no home.
“Let me first bury my father.” Christ: let the dead bury their dead. The cost: no delay.
“Let me first say goodbye.” Christ: no one at the plough who looks back is fit for the kingdom. The cost: no backward glance.
St. Cyril: one teaching in three movements. The cost. The urgency. The direction. Forward.
The Ascension is ahead. The face is set. The plough is moving.
What are we looking back at?
Full reflection at Seeking Theosis
Third Sunday After the Resurrection – New Wine, New Wineskins:Mark 2:13-22
The resurrection is new wine. It demands new containers.
The old categories of who belongs and who does not. The old assumptions about how God works and who God calls. The old frameworks that held the old wine perfectly but cannot hold what God is doing now.
St. Ephrem: the wine of the resurrection is still fermenting. The Church must keep stretching. The moment it says “we have expanded enough, included enough, grown enough,” the wineskin hardens. And the wine will burst it.
Three weeks after Pascha, the wine is still expanding. Is your wineskin still stretching?
For our journey today:
– Look at who Christ is calling
– Sit at the mixed table
– Stretch the wineskin
Full reflection at Seeking Theosis
