St. Chrysostom & Colds

Well, my cold has proven to be a worthy adversary...I am entering week two. Like a sequel to a Horror film. Actually, I am feeling better but it is too soon to pronounce deliverance. I did that on Saturday and was pulled back into the pit of illness like Gandalf and the monster into the abyss.

Colds are like mosquitoes. Irritating, but not usually deadly (unless one lives in the developing world). Humbling, chastising, and frustrating. The relative ease of my life made more difficult.

I checked this morning on the world's Misery-Meter. My cold put me in the top two billion of the most miserable people on earth today. We Westerners are such babies. We pull out a Kleenex and think ourselves Martyrs.

Read a devotional from St. Chrysostom, a homily of his on Romans 12:2, this morning. Being one who wants to be transformed from sickness to health physically is a strong reminder that I should more earnestly seek spiritual transformation from the sickness of sin to the health of the Gospel.

Here are his thoughts:

Rom 12:2 And be not conformed (fashioned) to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

For the fashion of this world is grovelling and worthless, and but for a time, neither loftiness, or lastingness, or straightforwardness, but is wholly perverted. If then thou wouldest walk upright, figure not thyself after the fashion of this life present. For in it there is nought abiding or stable. And this is why he calls it a fashion; and so in another passage, “the fashion of this world passeth away.” (1 Cor. vii. 31.) For it hath no durability or fixedness, but all in it is but for a season; and so he calls it this age, hereby to indicate its liableness to misfortune, and by the word fashion its unsubstantialness. For speak of riches, or of glory, or beauty of person, or of luxury, or of whatever other of its seemingly great things you will, it is a fashion only, not reality, a show and a mask, not any abiding substance. But “be not thou fashioned after this, but be transformed,” he says, “by the renewing of your mind.” He says not change the fashion, but “be transformed” (metamorfoy), to show that the world’s ways are a fashion, but virtue’s not a fashion, but a kind of real form, with a natural beauty of its own, lacking not the trickeries and fashions of outward things, which no sooner appear than they go to nought. For all these things, even before they come to light, are dissolving. If then thou throwest the fashion aside, thou wilt speedily come to the form. For nothing is more strengthless than vice, nothing so easily wears old. Then since it is likely that being men they would sin every day, he consoles his hearer by saying, “renew thyself” from day to day. This is what we do with houses, we keep constantly repairing them as they wear old, and so do thou unto thyself. Hast thou sinned to-day? hast thou made thy soul old? despair not, despond not, but renew it by repentance, and tears and confession, and by doing of good things. And never fail of doing this.