Older Calendar churches celebrate today both the Circumcision of the Lord and St. Basil the Great, who died at age 49 (!) in AD 379, having impacted practically every aspect of Orthodox Christian church-tradition. So, this morning I looked into my notes, from reading St. Basil’s collected works years ago, and – while this seems a random topic for today – I remembered how delightfully quotable I found his little essay “On Envy.” It’s just one little testament to how much he lived and reflected on the life in Christ, not without a touch of humor.
St. Basil’s life was complicated, including being born into a large and saintly family; extensive studies of both Christian and pagan academic disciplines; a short-lived career of teaching law and rhetoric; an abandonment of that, to take up (an also short-lived) solitary ascetical life, having encountered the charismatic & ascetical bishop Eustathius of Sebaste who became Basil’s mentor; a rift with this mentor over dogma, and founding of a monastic community that included his female relatives; being ordained deacon at age 32, priest at age 35 and bishop at age 40; involvement in both political and church-dogmatic disputes (let’s note these have always been intertwined to various degrees), throughout which he switched allegiances from initially supporting the ‘Homoiousians’ to becoming a strong supporter of the Nicene Creed, while displaying a readiness to dialog and compromise, where possible. He could be adamant, as he was when the Emperor Valens sent his prefect to him, to get the saint to agree to a compromise with the Arians. Having spoken with St. Basil, the prefect remarked that nobody had ever spoken to him ‘like that’ before, to which Basil replied, “Perhaps you have never yet had to deal with a bishop”; he continuously helped the poor and destitute; contributed to reform and enrichment of Liturgy, and the list goes on.
Returning to his above-quoted reflections “On Envy,” we can see that St. Basil learned a lot about himself and others, throughout it all. His observation about envy, as something that makes our lives “never without cause for grief and despondency,” sticks in my mind, not only with regard to envy, but so many other time-wasting obsessions. Let’s take anger, for example; anger at what is wrong with our society and our world, which is always on display in the news. This can make our lives “never without cause for grief and despondency,” both of which cripple us in living our vocations, however small or insignificant they may be, with the joy and gratitude (and bit of humor sprinkled here and there) that is always within our reach, with Christ in our midst. Or take “unrequited love,” (which I think is a form of envy, sometimes, because it involves a desire for something not belonging to us), which is another reason to live “never without cause for grief and despondency.” Another one is greed, also related to envy, and self-centeredness, which similarly lead to wasting time. By the prayers of St. Basil, who lived his complicated 49 years so attentively, dear God, help us to do the little bit we can today, to Your greater glory. 😍
