HG Bishop Ioan Casian: the solution to have a spiritually fruitful soul – directing our heart towards God
HG Bishop Ioan Casian: the solution to have a spiritually fruitful soul – directing our heart towards God
In his sermon, His Grace Bishop Ioan Casian spoke about the multiple significance of Sunday, correlating the evangelical text of the sower with the event of remembering the Holy Fathers of the VII Ecumenical Synod (787 AD) celebrated.
The hierarch made a brief historical retrospective of the ecumenical synodal meetings, emphasizing the importance of synodality (conciliarity) for the Orthodox space and how they contributed to strengthening solidarity and defining the faith, and then realized the exegesis of the evangelical text.
He thus wished to show, based on those already mentioned in the text, that He who sows is the Lord, the seed is the Word of God, and the various kinds of soil are represented by our souls. He talked about the different categories of people and how they come into contact with God’s teaching. He then showed how the worries of life, the social temptations, and the lack of sincere and consistent interest can keep the good seed of God’s word from bearing fruit in souls.
When he spoke of the fertile soil, the hierarch pointed out some fundamental aspects, namely that the good soil is the soul of each of us and that it is not enough to be good in itself, that is, not to sin, but it is necessary that goodness to be manifested in relation to others in its fullness and to make it a truly fruitful place for the word of God. He also spoke about the asceticism of receiving the good seed, that is, about receiving this word and making it bear fruit, requires consistent effort and practice in the exercise of loving one’s neighbor. The dynamic of the spiritual life is therefore centered around these ascetic efforts.
“In a world so marked by uncertainty and various factors that tend to turn us into a barren soil, the solution is to turn our hearts to God,” said HG Bishop Ioan Casian.
Pointing to the fact that the Savior Christ many times expresses Himself through a parable, which represents a reality through a story, the hierarch of Canada showed that iconography itself is a form of parable. Thus, he related the event of the seventh Ecumenical Council to the content of the Gospel text whose exegesis he performed.
